"Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors."
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Science quotes
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Science quotes (page 43 of 352)
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"The plough is to the farmer what the wand is to the sorcerer. Its effect is really like sorcery."
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"[The internet] ought to be like clay, rather than a sculpture that you observe from a distance."
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"The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. ... If you will simply admit that maybe Nature does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."
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"The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away."
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"Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent."
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"Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles."
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"Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information."
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"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."
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"And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature."
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"Beneath multiple specific and individual distinctions, beneath innumerable and incessant transformations, at the bottom of the circular evolution without beginning or end, there hides a law, a unique nature participated in by all beings, in which this common participation produces a ground of common harmony."
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"[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a bend in the road."
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"Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is empirically explained."
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"Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order."
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"Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos."
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"Is it a fact-or have I dreamt it-that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?"
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"UV is bad for molecules because its high energy breaks the bonds between a molecule's constituent atoms. That's why UV is bad for you, too: it's always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh."
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"Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science."
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"This Excellent Mathematician having given us, in the Transactions of February last, an account of the cause, which induced him to think upon Reflecting Telescopes, instead of Refracting ones, hath thereupon presented the curious world with an Essay of what may be performed by such Telescopes; by which it is found, that Telescopical Tubes may be considerably shortened without prejudice to their magnifiying effect. On his invention of the catadioptrical telescope, as he communicated to the Royal Society."
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"In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions."
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