Science quotes
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"All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend."
"We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present."
"If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag."
"Round numbers are always false."
"The injurious agent in cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called "acrolein." It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes."
"Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact."
"Proposition IX. Radiant light consists in Undulations of the Luminiferous Ether."
"Suppose a number of equal waves of water to move upon the surface of a stagnant lake, with a certain constant velocity, and to enter a narrow channel leading out of the lake. Suppose then another similar cause to have excited another equal series of waves, which arrive at the same time, with the first. Neither series of waves will destroy the other, but their effects will be combined."
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
"To guess what to keep and what to throw away takes considerable skill. Actually it is probably merely a matter of luck, but it looks as if it takes considerable skill."
"I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without any purpose - which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me."
"The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift."
"Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment."
"I would rather be right than rigorous."
"Science is the topography of ignorance."
"I see I have made my self a slave to Philosophy."
"The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations."
"[1.] And first I suppose that there is diffused through all places an aethereal substance capable of contraction & dilatation, strongly elastick, & in a word, much like air in all respects, but far more subtile. 2. I suppose this aether pervades all gross bodies, but yet so as to stand rarer in their pores then in free spaces, & so much ye rarer as their pores are less ... 3. I suppose ye rarer aether within bodies & ye denser without them, not to be terminated in a mathematical superficies, but to grow gradually into one another."
"Qu. 31. Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting, refracting and reflecting them, but also upon one another for producing a great part of the Phænomena of Nature?"
"The partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch not in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs."
