Famous Quotes & Sayings

Freeman Dyson

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.

Freeman Dyson

If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.

Freeman Dyson

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

Freeman Dyson

One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

Freeman Dyson

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

Freeman Dyson

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

Franz Kafka

All science is methodolgy with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It isa husk, but not more than everything except the One.

Enrico Fermi

Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.

Enrico Fermi

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Science and technology have freed humanity from many burdens and given us this new perspective and great power. This power can be used for the good of all. If wisdom governs our actions; but if the world is mad or foolish, it can destroy itself just when great advances and triumphs are almost without its grasp.

Jasper Fforde

For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

Guy Kawasaki

Some things need to be believed to be seen.

J. G. Ballard

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Ivar Giaever

Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

My parents, once I made it clear to them that I wanted to do science, they were totally sympathetic.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

Carl Sagan

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Carl Sagan

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.

Carl Sagan

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

Carl Sagan

I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.

Carl Sagan

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have.

Carl Sagan

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

Carl Sagan

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science

Carl Sagan

The claim is also sometimes made that science is as arbitrary or irrational as all other claims to knowledge, or that reason itself is an illusion. As Ethan Allen said Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are labouring to dethrone. If they argue without reason, which they must do, in order to be consistent with themselves, they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.

Bill Bryson

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

Bill Bryson

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

Benoit Mandelbrot

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales.

Benoit Mandelbrot

I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid-a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry-Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity ... The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless," to investigate the morphology of the "amorphous."

Antoine Lavoisier

In every combustion there is disengagement of the matter of fire or of light. A body can burn only in pure air [oxygen]. There is no destruction or decomposition of pure air and the increase in weight of the body burnt is exactly equal to the weight of air destroyed or decomposed. The body burnt changes into an acid by addition of the substance that increases its weight. Pure air is a compound of the matter of fire or of light with a base. In combustion the burning body removes the base, which it attracts more strongly than does the matter of heat, which appears as flame, heat and light.

Antoine Lavoisier

Mathematicians come to the solution of a problem by the simple arrangement of the data, and reducing the reasoning to such simple operations, to judgments so brief, that they never lose sight of the evidence that serves as their guide.

Bertrand Russell

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

Bertrand Russell

Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man