All Quotes By Tag: Science

“See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind … is the one fundamental treason which the scholar’s mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.”

“Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, “as in a battle,” to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which “dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.”

“If science wants to be truthful,What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?I close my eyes and the hard earth where I’m lyingHas a reality so real even my back feels it.I don’t need reason — I have shoulderblades.”

“As the ninth-century legal scholar Malik ibn Anas, founder of the Maliki school of law, once quipped, “This religion is a science, so pay close attention to those from whom you learn it.”

“Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.”

“We’re very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they’re beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can’t see them under our big noses.”

“As he learned more math, Brodt made the wonder-inspiring observation that mathematical laws seemed to be Someone’s intention rather than just accidents in many concepts: infinity, unity being totality, irrational numbers in general and pi in particular as it illustrates such disparate occurrences as the relationship of height to base perimeter in the Great Pyramid of Giza and the course of any meandering river (over a surface smoothed for consistency). There was also the Fibonacci Sequence, that looping string of addends which, with their sums, describes the spirals on a nautilus shell, the distribution of leaves around a tree branch, and the genealogy of ants and bees. It all seemed too orderly, too regular and consistent to have occurred by chance. So many things in the world appeared as blotches, smears, or random spikes that these mathematically explained phenomena were extraordinary–he wanted to say mystical, but he wouldn’t want to be caught using that word.”

“Nothing sprang up at him in his youth that declared the presence of God, but when he studied mathematics in high school and college, one principle arrested his attention: central tendency, the great force drawing natural phenomena toward moderation and away from extremes. Some birch trees are tall at maturity and some are short, but most are a middle height. A cat can give birth to any number of kittens from one to eight in a typical litter, but more kittens are born to litters of four than any other litter size. The differences fall quite smoothly along a bell curve. Scientific consensus was that all genetic traits, except of course those that had been intentionally altered, including human height, weight, intelligence, etc. were so distributed. It was like nature did what Brodt had one day in the breakroom heard Sanayah call “choosing the middle path.” Was central tendency a law of nature or a law of God, or were they the same thing?”

“Truths are as much a matter of questions as answers.”

“There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.”

“Justice, love, truth, peace and harmony, a serene unity with science and the laws of the universe.”

“Science is only a Latin word for knowledge”

“To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)”

“Vulnerable, like all men, to the temptations of arrogance, of which intellectual pride is the worst, he [the scientist] must nevertheless remain sincere and modest, if only because his studies constantly bring home to him that, compared with the gigantic aims of science, his own contribution, no matter how important, is only a drop in the ocean of truth.”

“As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It’s a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It, could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm.”