Science and Research

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Douglas Adams

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
-- Isaac Asimov

When the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists, and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, right.
-- Isaac Asimov

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knoweldge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.
-- Isaac Asimov

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'
-- Isaac Asimov

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
-- Charles Babbage

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are a lot of old things we don't know.
-- Ambrose Bierce

What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
-- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Wernher von Braun

You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
--Albert Camus

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.
-- Harold Coffin

I love to doubt as well as know.
-- Dante

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.
--Clarence Darrow

Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
-- Rene Descartes (Discours de la Methode)

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
-- Walt Disney

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
-- Thomas Alva Edison

I haven't failed. I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.
-- Thomas Edison

I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
-- Thomas Edison

It is disconcerting to reflect on the number of students we have flunked for not knowing what we later found to be untrue.
-- Thomas Alva Edison

Results! Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
-- Thomas Alva Edison

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
-- Albert Einstein

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.
-- Albert Einstein

Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality.
-- Albert Einstein

I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive.
-- Albert Einstein

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
-- Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
-- Albert Einstein

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
-- Albert Einstein

The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family as bearer of tradition and education has become weakened. The continuance and health of human society is therefore in a still higher degree dependent on school than formally.
-- Albert Einstein

The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society. Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province.
-- Albert Einstein

To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject.
-- Albert Einstein

One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.
-- Albert Einstein

With the affairs of active human beings it is different. Here knowledge of truth alone does not suffice; on the contrary this knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stan ds in the desert and is continuously threatened with burial by the shifting sands. The hands of science must ever be at work in order that the marble column continue everlastingly to shine in the sun. To those serving hands mine also belong.
-- Albert Einstein

One should guard against inculcating a young man {or woman} with the idea that success is the aim of life, for a successful man normally receives from his peers an incomparably greater portion than the services he has been able to render them deserve. The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving. The most important motive for study at school, at the university, and in life is the pleasure of working and thereby obtaining results which will serve the community. The most important task for our educators is to awaken and encourage these psychological forces in a young man {or woman}. Such a basis alone can lead to the joy of possessing one of the most precious assets in the world -- knowledge or artistic skill.
-- Albert Einstein

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.
-- Albert Einstein

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
-- Albert Einstein

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
-- Albert Einstein

Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible. To put it boldly, it is the attempt at a posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization. Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.
-- Albert Einstein

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
-- Albert Einstein

Why does this applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.
-- Albert Einstein

The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.
-- Albert Einstein

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
-- Albert Einstein

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. Nevertheless, no one doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.
-- Albert Einstein

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
[responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray.]
-- Albert Einstein

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them hither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside.
-- Albert Einstein

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
-- Albert Einstein

I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded,as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.
-- Albert Einstein

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.
-- Albert Einstein

When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of the globe, he doesn't realize that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it.
-- Albert Einstein

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
-- Albert Einstein

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
-- Albert Einstein

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
-- Albert Einstein

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
-- Richard Feynman

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
-- Richard Feynman

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
-- Harry Emerson Fosdick

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.
-- Hardy, Godfrey H

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.
-- Hardy, Godfrey H

In great mathematics there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
-- Hardy, Godfrey H

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. Immortality may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
-- Godfrey H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940)

Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen.
[We must know. We will know.]
-- David Hilbert, Epitaph

The wonder of science is not in the answers it provides but in the questions it uncovers. For every miracle it finally explains, ten thousand more miracles come into being.
-- John Pielmeier, Agnes of God (1978)

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with facts for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
-- Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (1883)

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
-- Bertrand Russell

In all things it is a good idea to hang a question mark now and then on the things we have taken for granted.
-- Bertrand Russell

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

The empiricist thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
-- George Santayana

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?
-- George Bernard Shaw

Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
-- Charles Percy Snow

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative.
-- Charles Percy Snow

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
-- Albert von Szent-Györgyi

It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs.
-- Stanislaw Ulam

No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.
-- Voltaire

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
-- Voltaire

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-- Voltaire

A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.
-- Westheimer's Discovery

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

Necessity is the mother of invention is a silly proverb. Necessity is the mother of futile dodges is much closer to the truth. The basis of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: By the Roadside (1855)

I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time.
-- Steven Wright

I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.
-- Malcolm X

Truth decays into beauty, while beauty soon becomes merely charm. Charm ends up as strangeness, and even that doesn't last, but up and down are forever.
-- anon/The Laws of Physics