Science quotes
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"As for the search for truth, I know from my own painful searching, with its many blind alleys, how hard it is to take a reliable step, be it ever so small, towards the understanding of that which is truly significant."
"We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions."
"It must be conceded that a theory has an important advantage if its basic concepts and fundamental hypotheses are 'close to experience,' and greater confidence in such a theory is certainly justified. There is less danger of going completely astray, particularly since it takes so much less time and effort to disprove such theories by experience. Yet more and more, as the depth of our knowledge increases, we must give up this advantage in our quest for logical simplicity in the foundations of physical theory."
"A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it."
"How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?"
"In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction."
"If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist."
"I cannot seriously believe in it [quantum theory] because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance [spukhafte Fernwirkungen]."
"Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary."
"[Mystery] is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
"Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."
"The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought."
"Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning."
"A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost."
"Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things."
"There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil."
"Intelligence is not creative; judgment is not creative. If a sculptor is nothing but skill and mind, his hands will be without genius."
"The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age, the mind at about forty-nine."
"The energy or active exercise of the mind constitutes life."
"Since we think we understand when we know the explanation, and there are four types of explanation (one, what it is to be a thing; one, that if certain things hold it is necessary that this does; another, what initiated the change; and fourth, the aim), all these are proved through the middle term."
