Gamow, George
God was very much disappointed, and wanted first to contract the Universe again, and to start all over from the beginning. But it would be much too simple. Thus, being almighty, God decided to correct His mistake in a most impossible way.
And God said: "Let there by Hoyle." And there was Hoyle. And God looked at Hoyle...and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased.
And Hoyle decided to make heavy elements in stars, and to spread them around by supernova explosions.
To keep order and preserve the properties, I never permit more than two electrons to follow the same track; a menage a trois always gives a lot of trouble, you know.
Atome prreemorrdiale!
All-containeeng Atome!
Deesolved eento fragments exceedeengly small.
Galaxies formeeng,
Each wiz prrimal enerrgy!
Genesis 2:20
And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast.
Gillispie, C.C.
Indeed the renewals of the subjective approach to nature make a pathetic theme. Its ruins lie strewn like good intentions all along the ground traversed by science, until it survives only in strange corners like Lysenkoism and anthroposophy, where nature is socialized or moralized. Such survivals are relics of the perpetual attempt to escape the consequences of western man's most characteristic and successful campaign, which must doom to conquer. So like any thrust in the face of the inevitable, romantic natural philosophy has induced every nuance of mood from desperation to heroism. At the ugliest, it is sentimental or vulgar hostility to intellect. At the noblest, it inspired Diderot's naturalistic and moralizing science, Goethe's personification of nature, the poetry of Wordsworth, and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, or of any other who would find a place in science for our qualitative and aesthetic appreciation of nature. It is the science of those who would make botany of blossoms and meteorology of sunsets.
Gissing, George
I hate and fear science because of my conviction that for long to come if not for ever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all the beauty of the world; I see it restoring barbarism under a mask of civilization; I see it darkening men's minds and hardening their hearts; I see it bringing a time of vast conflicts which will pale into insignificance 'the thousand wars of old' and, as likely as not, will wheel all the laborious advances of mankind in blood-drenched chaos.
Glasgow, Ellen
Last night the stars were magnificent--Pegasus and Andromeda faced me brilliantly when I lifted my shade, so I went down and had a friendly reunion with the constellations--
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Content without method leads to fantasy; method without content to empty sophistry; matter without form to unwieldy crudition, form without matter to hollow speculation.
Graham, L.A.
Hey diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped into the blue;
Her leap into action
Took plenty of traction,
The product of Force times mew.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Wondering how hard he would fall.
Force times time, you will agree,
Is equal to mass times velocity.
Graton, L.C.
The purpose of classification is not to set forth final and indisputable truths but rather to afford stepping stones towards better understanding.
Gregory, Olinthus
The science of mechanics, whether considered in its theory as a subject of curious and refined speculations, calculated for the learned, ingenious, and contemplative, or in practice as contribution to the conveniences and elegancies of life, and the wealth of nations, may be ranked the first and most important of all human acquirements.
Gross, David
One of the best of the many Pauli jokes tells of Pauli's arriving in Heaven and being given, as befits a theoretical physicist, an appointment with God. When granted the customary free wish, he requests that God explain to him why the value of the fine-structure constant, a = e2/( h x c), which measures the strength of the electric force, is 0.00729735....God goes to the blackboards and starts to write furiously. Pauli watches with pleasure but soon starts shaking his head violently...
Hall, A.R.
The cumulative growth of science, arising from the employment of methods of investigation and reasoning which have been justified by their fruits and their resistance to the corrosion of criticism, cannot be reduced to any single themes. We cannot say...why some men can perceive the truth, or a technical trick, which has eluded others. From the bewildering variety of experience in its social, economic and psychological aspects it is possible to extract only a few factors, here and there, which have had a bearing on the development of science. At present at least, we can only describe, and begin to analyse, where we should like to understand. The difficulty is the greater because the history of science is not, and cannot be, a tight unity. The different branches of science are themselves unlike in complexity, in techniques, and in their philosophy. They are not all affected equally, or at the same time, by the same historical factors, whether internal or external. It is not even possible to trace the development of a single scientific method, some formulation of principles and rules of operating which might be imagined as applicable to every scientific inquiry, for there is no such thing.
Halmos, Paul
Teachers of elementary mathematics in the USA frequently complain that all calculus books are bad. That is a case in point. Calculus books are bad because there is no such subject as calculus; it is not a subject because it is many subjects. What we call calculus nowadays is the union of a dab of logic and set theory, some axiomatic theory of complete ordered fields, analytic geometry and topology, the latter in both the "general" sense (limits and continuous functions) and the algebraic sense (orientation), real-variable theory properly so called (differentiation), the combinatoric symbol manipulation called formal integration, the first steps of low-dimensional measure theory, some differential geometry, the first steps of the classical analysis of the trigonometric, exponential, and logarithmic functions, and, depending on the space available and the personal inclination of the author, some cook-book differential equations, elementary mechanics, and a small assortment of applied mathematics. Any one of these is hard to write a good book on; the mixture is impossible.
Hanson, Norwood Russell
Physics is not applied mathematics. It is a natural science in which mathematics can be applied.
Patterns of Discovery (p. 72) )
Hartley, David
Animals are also analogous to Vegetables in many things, and Vegetables to Minerals: So that there seems to be a perpetual Thread of Analogy continued from the most perfect Animal to the most imperfect Mineral, even till we come to elementary Bodies themselves.
Hawking, Stephen
Although Bekenstein's hypothesis that black holes have a finite entropy requires for its consistency that black holes should radiate thermally, at first it seems a complete miracle that the detailed quantum-mechanical calculations of particle creation should give rise to emission with a thermal spectrum. The explanation is that the emitted particles tunnel out of the black hole from a region of which an external observer has no knowledge other than its mass, angular momentum and electric charge. This means that all combinations or configurations of emitted particles that have the same energy, angular momentum and electric charge are equally probable. Indeed, it is possible that the black hole could emit a television set or the works of Proust in 10 leather-bound volumes...
Heaviside, Oliver
...an old idea that the speed of gravitation must be an enormous multiple of the speed of light...is only moonshine.
Heinlein, Robert A.
Physics doesn't have to have any use. It just is.
Time for the Stars (p. 138) )
Helmholtz, Hermann von
...the ultimate aim of physical science must be to demonstrate the movements which are the real causes of all other phenomena and discover the motive powers on which they all depend; in other words, to merge itself into mechanics.
Henslow, John Stevens
To obtain a knowledge of a science of observation, like botany, we need make very little more exertion at first than is required for adapting a chosen set of terms to certain appearances of which the eye takes cognisance, and when this has been attained, all the rest is very much like reading a book after we have learned to spell, where every page affords a fresh field of intellectual enjoyment.
Hodnett, Edward
A formula is like a basket. Try to pick up a dozen apples from the ground and carry them in your hands. It is well-nigh impossible. With a basket you can carry as many as you can lift.
What you do to a situation when you use a formula approach is to schematize it. You impose a pattern on it...
Hogan, James P.
Scientists are the easiest to fool...They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurers ? they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident.
Code of the Lifemaker
Chapter I (p. 14) )
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
But he who, blind to universal laws,
Sees but effects, unconscious of the causes,...
Holmes, Sherlock
. . . you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confiding yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.
Holton, Gerald
And yet, on looking into the history of science, one is overwhelmed by evidence that all too often there is no regular procedure, no logical system of discovery, no simple, continuous development. The process of discovery has been as varied as the temperament of the scientist.
Hopkins, Harry
Figures are faceless and incestuous.
Hoyle, Fred
On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much the less palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms.
Hubble, Edwin
No theory is sacred. When a theory fails to meet the test of verified predictions, it is modified to include the larger field, or, vary rarely, it may be abandoned completely.
The Nature of Science
Experiment and Experience (p. 41)
Huxley, Aldous
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.
Huxley, Thomas
I often wish that this phrase "applied science," had never been invented. For it suggests that there is a sort of scientific knowledge of direct practical use, which can be studied apart from another sort of scientific knowledge, which is of no practical utility, and which is termed "pure science." But there is no more complete fallacy than this.
Nature is never in a hurry, and seems to have had always before her eyes the adage, :keep a thing long enough and you will find a use for it".
The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
Irwin, Keith Gordon
It is nature, of course, that is the great chemist. Every growing plant is a marvelous chemical factory, every living thing a brilliant shifter of atoms from one bewildering compound to another. And down in the depths of the earth enormous forces operate to create the minerals that someday may be close to the earth's surface.
Jeans, Sir James Hopwood
Kronecker is quoted as saying that in arithmetic God made the integers and man made the rest; in the same spirit we may perhaps say that in physics God made the mathematics and man made the rest.
Physics and Philosophy
Chapter 1 (p. 16)
...physics tries to discover the pattern of events which controls the phenomena we observe. But we can never know what this pattern means or how it originates; and even if some superior intelligence were to tell us, we should find the explanation unintelligible.
Physics and Philosophy
Chapter I (p. 16)
Space, regarded as a receptacle for radiant energy, is a bottomless pit.
Nature Supplement
November 3, 1928 (p. 698)
Joubert, Joseph
Space is the Stature of God.
Pensées
Number 183
Koestler, Arthur
[Scientists are] Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity.
The Roots of Coincidence
Chapter 5, section 9 (p. 140)
King, Alexander
Newton saw an apple fall and discovered the Laws of Gravity.
Eve made an apple fall and discovered the Gravity of Law...
Kronenberger, L.
Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all...of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.
Lagen, Doug
The lab is my jeopardy, I cannot breathe.
It eateth my clothes with strong acids.
It destroyeth my soles.
It leadeth me into the paths of science for its own sake.
Yea, though I walk through the welter of stink and smells, I will fear not chemical, for it is oneness.
It provideth me a bench in the presence of fluorine.
It loadeth my day with toil.
My beaker runneth over.
Surely bad tastes and odors shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of science forever.
Leacock, Stephen
Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.
Le Guin, Ursula K.
...it is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb and then puts its hands over its eyes and says, My God what have I done?...
Language of the Night
The Stalin in the Soul (p. 219)
Lebowitz, Fran
Science is not a pretty thing. It is unpleasantly proportioned, outlandishly attired and often over?eager. What then is the appeal of science? What accounts for its popularity? And who gives it its start?
Metropolitan Life
Science (p. 76)
Lewis, C.S.
This is called the inductive method. Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact.
Mathematical Sciences Education Board
Calculators and computers should be used in ways that anticipate continuing rapid change due to technological developments. Technology should be used not because it is seductive, but because it can enhance mathematical learning by extending each student's mathematical power.
Lubbock, John
Science, our Fairy Godmother, will, unless we perversely reject her help, and refuse her gifts, so richly endow us, that fewer hours of labour will serve to supply us with the material necessaries of life, leaving us more time to ourselves, more leisure to enjoy all that makes life best worth living.
The Beauties of Nature
Introduction (p. 37)
Lundberg, G.A.
...no science tells us what to do with the knowledge that constitutes the science. Science only provides a car and a chauffeur for us. It does not directly, as science, tell us where to drive. The car and the chauffeur will take us into the ditch, over the precipice, against a stone wall, or into the highlands of age?long human aspirations with equal efficiency. If we agree as to where we want to go and tell the driver our goal, he should be able to take us there by one of a number of possible routes the costs and conditions of each of which the scientist should be able to explain to us.
Can Science Save Us?
Social Problems (p. 31)
Matthew, William Diller
Many a false theory gets crystallized by time and absorbed into the body of scientific doctrine through lack of adequate criticism when it is formulated.
Climate and Evolution
Supplementary Note (p. 159)
Maxwell, James Clerk
As long as we have to deal with only two molecules, and have all the data given us, we can calculate the result of their encounter; but when we have to deal with millions of molecules, each of which has millions of encounters in a second, the complexity of the problem seems to shut out all hope of a legitimate solution.
[Molecular science]is one of those branches of study which deal with things invisible and imperceptible by our senses, and which cannot be subjected to direct experiment.
McAleer, Neil
The Galaxy contains more than
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 100 thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion dust grains.
Mill, John Stuart
There is in every step of an arithmetical or algebraical calculation a real induction, a real inference from facts to facts, and what disguises the induction is simply its comprehensive nature, and the consequent extreme generality of its language.
Noyes, Alfred
It was a comet, made of mortal sins...
Nye, Bill
The comet is a kind of astronomical parody on the planet. Comets look some like planets, but they are thinner and do not hurt so hard when they hit anybody as a planet does. The comet was so called because it had hair on it, I believe, but late years the bald-headed comet is giving just as good satisfaction everywhere.
O'Casey, Sean
...an me lookin' up at the sky an' sayin' "what is the stars, what is the stars"?
Juno and the Paycock
Act I (p. 25)
Pasternak, Boris
And there, with frightful listing
Through emptiness, away
Through unknown solar systems
Revolves the Milky Way...
Payne-Gaposchkin, Celia Helena
The constellations carry us back to the dawn of astronomy. They have been called the fossil remains of primitive stellar religion, and as such they have extraordinary interest.
Peebles, Phillip James Edwin
In cosmology the reliance on physical simplicity, pure thought and revealed knowledge is carried well beyond the fringe because we have so little else to go on. By this desperate course we have arrived at a few simple pictures of what the Universe may be like. The great goal is now to become more familiar with the Universe, to learn whether any of these pictures may be a reasonable approximation, and if so how the approximation may be improved. The great excitement in cosmology is that the prospects for doing this seem to be excellent.
Poincare, Henri
Consider now the Milky Way; there also we see an innumerable dust; only the grains of this dust are not atoms, they are stars; these grains move also with high velocities; they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distance that their trajectories are straight; and yet, from time to time, two of them may approach near enough to be deviated from their path, like a comet which had passed too near Jupiter. In a world, to the eyes of a giant for whom our suns would be as for us our atoms, the Milky Way would seem only a bubble of gas.
The stars are majestic laboratories, gigantic crucibles, such as no chemist could dream.
The Foundations of Science
The Value of Science
Astronomy (p. 295)
Raju, P.T.
We are driven to conclude that science, like mathematics, is a system of axioms, assumptions, and deductions; it may start from being, but later leaves it to itself, and ends in the formation of a hypothetical reality that has nothing to do with existence; or it is the discovery of an ideal being which is of course, present in what we call actuality, and renders it an existence for us only by being present in it.
Rucker, Rudy
I love cosmology: theres something uplifting about viewing the entire universe as a single object with a certain shape. What entity, short of God, could be nobler or worthier of man's attention than the cosmos itself? Forget about interest rates, forget about war and murder, let's talk about space.
Russell, Bertrand A.
Measurement demands some one-one relations between the numbers and magnitudes in question--a relation which may be direct or indirect, important or trivial, according to circumstances.
Sagan, Carl
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.
Sage, M.
...battalions of figures are like battalions of men, not always as strong as is supposed.
Simpson, George Gaylord
Biology, then, is the science that stands at the center of all science. It is the science most directly aimed at science's major goal and most definitive of that goal. And it is here, in the field where all the principles of all the sciences are embodied, that science can truly become unified.
Starling, E.H.
Every discovery, however important and apparently epoch-making, is but the natural and inevitable outcome of a vast mass of work, involving many failures, by a host of different observers, so that if it is not made by Brown this year it will fall into the lap of Jones, or of Jones and Robinson simultaneously, next year or the year after.
Tagore, Rabindranath
Through millions and millions of years,
The stars shine,
Fiery whirlpools revolve and rise
In the dark ever-moving current of time.
In this current
The earth is a bubble of mud...
Our Universe (p. 43) )
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
The fires that arch this dusty dot--
Yon myriad worlded-ways--
The vast sun-cluster' gathered blaze,
World-isles in lonely skies,
Whole heavens within themselves amaze
Our brief Humanities.
Terence
Nothing is so difficult but that it may be found out by seeking.
Heauton Timorumenos
Act iv, scene 2, l. 675
Thomson, J.J.
...research in applied science leads to reforms, research in pure science leads to revolutions...
The Life of Sir J.J. Thomson (p. 199)
Twain, Mark
We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.
Huckleberry Finn
Chapter XIX
Waismann, Friedrich
Will anyone seriously assert that the existence of negative numbers is guaranteed by the fact that there exist in the world hot assets and cold, and debts? Shall we refer to these things in the structure of arithmetic? Who does not see that thereby an entirely foreign element enters into arithmetic, which endangers the pureness and clarity of its concepts?
Watts, Alan W.
The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought.
West, Nathaniel
Prayers for the condemned man's soul will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers, he explained, constitute the only universal language.
Whitehead, Alfred North
The living cell is to biology what the electron and the proton are to physics.
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