Top 100 Quotes About Science Discovery
#1. In science ... "discovery" can mean finding a guppy with an extra spine in its dorsal fin.
Thomas Hayden
#2. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total.
Louise Bourgeois
#3. I had fallen in love with a young man ... , and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis ... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery ...
Gertrude B. Elion
#4. There are almost unlimited possibilities for making discoveries and to uncover the unknown. It is in the nature of the discovery that it can not be planned or programmed. On the contrary it consists of surprises and appears many times in the most unexpected places.
Bengt I. Samuelsson
#5. Every good laboratory consists of first rate men working in great harmony to insure the progress of science; but down at the end of the hall is an unsociable, wrong-headed fellow working on unprofitable lines, and in his hands lies the hope of discovery.
Ernest Rutherford
#6. It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.
Thomas Pynchon
#7. Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.
John Pipkin
#8. A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes.
Jacobus Henricus Van 't Hoff
#9. It was a dogma throughout most of the 20th century that quantum science only applied to subatomic matter, and we now know that not to be true. One of the major discoveries was Quantum Holography.
Edgar Mitchell
#10. I feel strongly that we need the young people of today to become the scientists and the engineers of tomorrow so that my native United States continues to be a world leader in discovery and innovation. If we suppress science in this country, we are headed for trouble.
Bill Nye
#11. The trouble with science geeks, as you call them, is that hey put discovery before anything else. It was a science geek who discovered the atom bomb. He didn't intend to cause mass murder, but he did nonetheless.
Gemma Malley
#12. Truly the gods have not from the beginning revealed all things to mortals, but by long seeking, mortals discover what is better.
Xenophanes
#13. It wasn't long after the discovery of modern anesthesia that people began to die of it.
Wolf Pascoe
#14. In the year 1866, I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science
Mary Baker Eddy
#15. The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.
Jacob Bronowski
#16. The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.
William Kingdon Clifford
#17. Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task.
Richard Leakey
#18. We all know we fall. Newton's discovery was that the moon falls, too-and by the same rule that we do.
Isaac Asimov
#19. The Hubble Law is one of the great discoveries in science; it is one of the main supports of the scientific story of Genesis.
Robert Jastrow
#20. Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.
Konrad Lorenz
#21. Science Fiction and Romance share the same DNA. At their very heart, they are about exploration and discovery.
Laurie A. Green
#22. Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknown.
Abhijit Naskar
#23. Discovery comes as a result of positive discontent, a constructive dissatisfaction. In fact, one might quite truthfully say that there is no discovery when one is content.
Myron Allen
#24. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
Marshall McLuhan
#25. [ ... ] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.
Stephen Jay Gould
#27. Science is never rigid, it is flexible. It can bend towards any direction that ultimately tends to do good to humanity. Religion must learn the same. And the moment any religion learns that, it would become the most scientific religion in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
#28. A scientific discovery is also a religious discovery. There is no conflict between science and religion. Our knowledge of God is made larger with every discovery we make about the world.
Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.
#29. If you wake up in Moscow and put on the Science channel, it doesn't feel like an American channel, it feels like their channel. In fact, Discovery is Vladimir Putin's favorite channel.
David Zaslav
#30. In the Year 2000 the discovery of extraterrestrial life will create a revolution in science, art, and pornography.
Conan O'Brien
#31. The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.
Jacob Bronowski
#32. Science fiction is the arena of the not-yet, and every science fiction story has this element of not-yet-ness - usually a bit of technology or a scientific discovery that we don't know about in the real world of the present but that might be a possibility in the future.
Welch Everman
#33. I like the 'Science Channel,' the 'Discovery Channel,' I like 'Discovery Times,' which is a fabulous hybrid of the 'New York Times' and 'Discovery Channel.' Maybe I'm just an old man, but I like to watch that stuff.
James Marsters
#34. If the hand be held between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself ... For brevity's sake I shall use the expression 'rays'; and to distinguish them from others of this name I shall call them 'X-rays'.
Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen
#35. If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous.
E. O. Wilson
#36. The better educated we are and the more acquired information we have, the better prepared shall we find our minds for making great and fruitful discoveries.
Claude Bernard
#37. Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.
Jules Verne
#38. Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#39. When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.
Francis Crick
#40. For me, the discovery of aquaporins was like a gift after 25 years in basic science.
Peter Agre
#41. We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a "third world" of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?
Oliver Sacks
#42. Priestley [said] that each discovery we make shows us many others that should be made.
Claude Bernard
#43. Up to that time I never realized that I possessed any particular gift of discovery, but Lord Rayleigh, whom I always considered as an ideal man of science, had said so and if that was the case, I felt that I should concentrate on some big idea.
Nikola Tesla
#44. A great unification is now taking place between science and spirituality. The most advanced discoveries of modern science are rising to reaffirm the timeless wisdom of the great religious and spiritual traditions of every culture.
John Hagelin
#45. Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.
Arthur Koestler
#46. But biology and computer science - life and computation - are related. I am confident that at their interface great discoveries await those who seek them.
Leonard Adleman
#47. The world to him no longer seemed a math equation but rather a complex piece of art, a masterpiece of things not easily understood.
K. Martin Beckner
#48. Ethics is the enemy of discovery. What you call ethics, I call the rape of science.
Katie Kacvinsky
#49. Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time. We live today in an era of discovery that far outshadows the discoveries of the New World five hundred years ago.
Michael Crichton
#50. There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.
Isaac Asimov
#51. Wonder ... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature.
Adam Smith
#52. Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.
Bertrand Russell
#53. ... and I submit to you, that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not become mainstream until the artist embraces the fruits of those discoveries.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#54. In chemistry, our theories are crutches; to show that they are valid, they must be used to walk ... A theory established with the help of twenty facts must explain thirty, and lead to the discovery of ten more.
Jean-Baptiste Dumas
#55. There are few moments in science in which you genuinely are excited. The discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 was one of those moments.
David Lee
#56. If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [of gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind (Chapter 65,p. 68)
Edward Gibbon
#57. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.
Michael Crichton
#58. The discovery of superfluidity opened up a new understanding in the science world.
David Lee
#59. I don't think there's any border between science and art. All the fiction films I have made were always on the same subject, - a discovery of the "Other," an exploration of difference.
Jean Rouch
#60. The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.
Henry David Thoreau
#61. The eighteenth century discovery that, in an institutional framework that facilitates voluntary exchanges among individuals, this process generates results that might be evaluated positively, produced 'economics,' as an independent academic discipline or science.
James M. Buchanan
#62. Great discoveries are made accidentally less often than the populace likes to think.
(Commenting on how an accident led to the discovery of X-rays)
William Cecil Dampier
#63. Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.
Carlo Rubbia
#64. Our novice runs the risk of failure without additional traits: a strong inclination toward originality, a taste for research, and a desire to experience the incomparable gratification associated with the act of discovery itself.
Santiago Ramon Y Cajal
#65. Every new discovery in science brings with it a host of new problems, just as the invention of the automobile brought with it gas stations, roads, garages, mechanics, and a thousand other subsidiary details.
Banesh Hoffmann
#66. One curious result of this inertia, which deserves to rank among the fundamental 'laws' of nature, is that when a discovery has finally won tardy recognition it is usually found to have been anticipated, often with cogent reasons and in great detail.
F. C. S. Schiller
#67. There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
Bill Bryson
#68. [Science fiction is] a specialized type of fantasy, in which the prime assumption usually is a new scientific discovery or invention.
Jack Williamson
#69. Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.
Sydney Brenner
#70. The philosophy of science is inherent in the process. This is to say, you think critically, you draw a conclusion based on evidence, but we all pursue discovery based on our observations. That's where science starts.
Bill Nye
#71. Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.
Carl Sagan
#72. May every young scientist remember and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery.
Patrick Blackett, Baron Blackett
#73. None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#74. As the Nation's primary supporter of research in the physical sciences, the DOE Office of Science led the way in creating a unique system of large-scale, specialized, often one-of-a-kind facilities for scientific discovery.
Judy Biggert
#75. Data-intensive graph problems abound in the Life Science drug discovery and development process.
Leroy Hood
#77. Competition is like experimentation in science, a discovery process, and it must rely on the self interest of producers, it must allow them to use their knowledge for their purposes, because nobody else possesses the information
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#78. His [Faraday's] third great discovery is the Magnetization of Light, which I should liken to the Weisshorn among mountains-high, beautiful, and alone.
John Tyndall
#79. All scholarship, like all science, is an ongoing, open-ended discussion in which all conclusions are tentative forever, the principal value and charm of the game being the discovery of the totally unexpected.
Hugh Nibley
#80. A discovery is generally an unforeseen relation not included in theory.
Claude Bernard
#81. The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history ... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
Rachel Carson
#82. The thrill of science is the process. It's a social process. It's a process of collective discovery. It's debate, it's experimentation and it's verification of claims that might be false. It's the greatest foundation for a society.
Greg Graffin
#83. It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists) ... despise utility. But because.. useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.
John Charles Polanyi
#84. All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.
Marshall McLuhan
#85. Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.
Alan Valentine
#86. My life is dedicated to the discovery of God, the advancement of science, and the pre-eminence of England.
Kedar Joshi
#87. You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way. -The Wheel, John Wtndham
John Wyndham
#88. I began to make inquiries of the hundreds of successful men who collaborated with me in the organization of the science of success, and discovered that each of them had received guidance from unknown sources, although many of them were reluctant to admit this discovery.
Napoleon Hill
#89. The discovery of any kind of life [in Space] at all would be a tremendous watershed moment in biology, as well as all of science.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#90. The old rules may say we can't protect our environment and promote economic growth at the same time, but in America, we've always used new technologies - we've used science; we've used research and development and discovery to make the old rules obsolete.
Barack Obama
#91. The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.
Claude Bernard
#93. The discovery which has been pointed to by theory is always one of profound interest and importance, but it is usually the close and crown of a long and fruitful period, whereas the discovery which comes as a puzzle and surprise usually marks a fresh epoch and opens a new chapter in science.
Oliver Lodge
#94. The world is not bound to get better as a result of new discoveries in science and technology, nor is it bound to get worse, there will simply be new opportunities for making it better or worse.
Brian Stableford
#95. The notion that any discovery of empirical science could possibly reduce God's circumstances, so to speak, or have any effect whatsoever on the logical content of the concept of God or of creation is one of the vulgar errors I wish to expose below.
David Bentley Hart
#96. Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#97. It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature.
Steven Weinberg
#98. The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.
John N. Bahcall
#99. The discovery of deuterium and the marked differences in the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen and deuterium, together with an efficient method for the separation of these isotopes, have opened an interesting field of research in several of the major branches of science.
Harold Urey
#100. Attention makes the genius; all learning, fancy, science and skills depend upon it. Newton traced his discoveries to it. It builds bridges, opens new worlds, heals diseases, carries on the business of the world. Without it taste is useless, and the beauties of literature unobserved.
Robert Aris Willmott
