science

• The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.

  — Novalis

• I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

  — Charles Darwin

• With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.

  — Carl Sagan

• Much of modern astronomy is promised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism.

  — Ted Chiang

• It would not be difficult to come to an agreement as to what we understand by science. Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thoroughgoing an association as possible.

  — Albert Einstein

• I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

  — Carl Sagan

• Physics is a wrong tool to describe living systems.

  — Donald Arthur Glaser

• Perhaps one per cent of the time, someone who has an idea that smells, feels and looks indistinguishable from the usual run of pseudoscience will turn out to be right.

  — Carl Sagan

• The best antidote for pseudoscience, I firmly believe, is science.

  — Carl Sagan

• Suppose your father... walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week.

  — Carl Sagan

• Nature is to us like an infinite ballot-box, the contents of which are being continually drawn, ball after ball, and exhibited to us. Science is but the careful observation of the succession in which balls of various character present themselves...

  — William Stanley Jevons

• I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level.

  — Donald Knuth

• I don’t believe in evolution, like people believe in God … Science and technology are not advanced by people who believe, but by people who don’t know but are doing their best to find out.

  — Terry Pratchett

• Science is a narrow tool: powerful and tenacious like a pit bull, but having no intrinsic wisdom or context. It concerns itself with what we can do, not what we should do.

  — Tom Murphy

• Science is the art of understanding nature.

  — George Boas

• The man in the street is always making this demand for concrete explanation of the things referred to in science; but of necessity he must be disappointed.

  — Arthur Eddington

• We're basic researchers. It would be delightful if these things do filter into the world, but I'd like to believe that's not our mission. Our mission is to invent new scientific ideas and spread them, and hope they are useful to someone.

  — Robert J. K. Jacob

• Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless more which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars.

  — Galileo Galilei

• It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is.

  — Richard Feynman

• When a thing gets very, very small, you can't tell the difference between a solid and a liquid. (16:30 in video)

  — Robert B. Laughlin