Top 100 Quotes About The History Of Science
#1. Tektology was the first attempt in the history of science to arrive at a systematic formulation of the principles of organization operating in living and nonliving systems.
Fritjof Capra
#2. The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.
Karl Popper
#3. The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.
Nikola Tesla
#4. The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.
Isaac Asimov
#5. To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#6. 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
#7. The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of pyrrhonian scepticism.
Pierre Duhem
#8. And, if you'll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you'll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just a matter of tidying up around the fringes of the big ideas.
Kurt Vonnegut
#9. In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.
C. V. Raman
#10. Just as science is more immediate and exciting than the history of science, so is insight more compelling than a history of insight.
Robert D. Richardson
#11. One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.
Henri Poincare
#12. This book is the story of the birth, growth, and future of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science:
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#13. I never had a single female professor throughout my whole education, from the beginning of university to the end. Even all the books were about men; I never really liked reading books about the history of science, and I never really understood why.
Margaret Geller
#14. If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance "God".
Jerry A. Coyne
#15. The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.
John William Draper
#16. You ask whether I am going over to the history of science ... no, I am not as old as that.
Christopher Kelk Ingold
#17. My suggestion to young people is that not only should they read about the history of science and engineering, but that they should read about the lives of those that have made contributions to these fields.
Warren M. Washington
#18. In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.
Abdus Salam
#19. The history of science teaches only too plainly the lesson that no single method is absolutely to be relied upon, that sources of error lurk where they are least expected, and that they may escape the notice of the most experienced and conscientious worker.
John William Strutt
#20. I came to realize that exaggerated concern about what others are doing can be foolish. It can paralyze effort, and stifle a good idea. One finds that in the history of science, almost every problem has been worked out by someone else. This should not discourage anyone from pursuing his own path.
Theodore Von Karman
#21. If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.
Jerry A. Coyne
#22. The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.
Ernst Mayr
#23. Any scientist who tells you they know that GMOs are safe and not to worry about it, is either ignorant of the history of science or is deliberately lying. Nobody knows what the long-term effect will be.
David Suzuki
#24. If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.
Archibald Geikie
#25. The history of science is the saga of nature defying common sense.
Kedar Joshi
#26. The history of science is the back-and-forth movement of trial-and-error advances and retreats, punctuated by moments of brilliance and marred by periods of excess.
Robert A. Burton
#27. The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#28. Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans - and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas - than quantum mechanics.
Sean Carroll
#29. It has been argued that close attention to the history of science is indispensable for doing good philosophy of science.
Samir Okasha
#30. The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
Richard Dawkins
#31. The task of the educator is to make the child's spirit pass again where its forefathers have gone, moving rapidly through certain stages but suppressing none of them. In this regard, the history of science must be our guide.
Henri Poincare
#32. The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
Alan Lightman
#33. To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.
Evelyn Fox Keller
#34. Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance.
Stephen Jay Gould
#35. The history of art cannot be properly understood without some reference to the history of science. In both we are studying the symbols by which man affirms his mental scheme, and these symbols, be they pictorial or mathematical, a fable or formula, will reflect the same changes.
Kenneth Clark
#36. The history of science shows that great mysteries get solved. It may be that there's an answer that humans are too stupid to understand. I'm intrigued by that possibility.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#37. The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.
Mark O'Connell
#39. In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.
Freeman Dyson
#40. I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.
Peter Ackroyd
#41. The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.
Ray Bradbury
#42. One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.
Simon Newcomb
#43. The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts amd amusements.
Charles Fort
#44. Each being in the universe yearns for the free energy necessary for survival and development. Each existence resists extinction. The consequent history of violence in the universe is as inevitable as the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Sun.
Brian Swimme
#45. It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
Steven Pinker
#46. I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.
Gail Carriger
#47. I have issues with anyone who tries to claim that science is unworkable - creationists who deny evidence for past history, yet are happy to benefit from the products of the methodology that they otherwise deny.
Liz Williams
#48. Any suggestion that science and religion are incompatible flies in the face of history, logic, and common sense.
Kenneth R. Miller
#49. And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.
Rene Descartes
#50. There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts ... it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.
David Coleman
#51. Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume
an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.
John Dewey
#52. Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.
Ernst W. Mayr
#53. Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all - the occult.
Adam Nevill
#54. Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress ...
Blaise Cendrars
#55. The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered.
Arthur Kornberg
#56. Time and time again, throughout the history of medical practice, what was once considered as "scientific" eventually becomes regarded as "bad practice".
David Stewart
#57. This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.
Jonas Salk
#58. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II
#59. I'm a geophysicist who has conducted and published climate studies in top-rank scientific journals. My perspective on Mr. Inhofe and the issue of global warming is informed not only by my knowledge of climate science but also by my studies of the history and philosophy of science.
David Deming
#60. Jean-Pierre Marquis, From a Geometrical Point of View: A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory, Springer Science & Business Media, 2008.
Roger Scruton
#61. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Norman Spinrad
#62. Conscious access to memory is a unique trait of living things, but memory itself is not. It's encoded in the minute vibrations between elementary particles. Our entire universe is built of information given shape. Part of that is its history. Its memory.
M.R. Graham
#63. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.
Diane Ravitch
#64. This relationship, often called the Golden mean, has been discovered and rediscovered at various times in history as a unique proportion believed to have both aesthetic and mystic significance. That the Egyptians knew of it and used it seems certain.
John Pile
#65. The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history - the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking.
Megan Smith
#66. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.
John Gray
#67. I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.
Steven Pinker
#68. Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form ... The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.
[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]
Jean-Henri Fabre
#69. History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.
Thomas Kuhn
#70. If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.
Henri Poincare
#72. History is the science of things which are not repeated.
Paul Valery
#73. I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'
(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993)
Peter F. Drucker
#74. Our challenge is to join forces of the old and the new- experience and experiment, history and destiny, the world of man and the new world of science- but always in accordance with the never-changing word of God.
Thomas S. Monson
#75. I think readers nowadays are happy to have genres blurred. We're seeing that on screen too: The Pirates of the Caribbean mashes up history and fantasy, Cowboys and Aliens mixes the Western and the Science Fiction genres.
Colette Freedman
#76. If God is God, he is the God of reality and facts and science and history.
Eric Metaxas
#77. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.
Kenneth Clark
#78. Nothing is as evanescent in history as the pansophic theories that flourish among the illuminati of all times under the bright sunlight of the latest scientific discoveries; and nothing can be more easily dismissed by later periods as mere speculation.
H. Richard Niebuhr
#79. I looked up at the wall. My bachelor's degree had been in History. Films like Back to the Future and Quantum Leap had been some of my favorite programs. Could time travel really be possible? This seemed too unreal.
Anna M. Aquino
#80. History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.
Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges
#81. [The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.
Edward Gibbon
#82. The early years of statistical development were dominated by men. Many women were working in the field, but they were almost all employed in doing the detailed calculations needed for statistical analysis, and were indeed called "computers".
David Salsburg
#83. George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature"
Robert Kuttner
#84. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.
Robert A. Heinlein
#85. What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.'
Martin Chalfie
#87. Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.
Steven Weinberg
#88. In recent times, modern science has developed to give mankind, for the first time in the history of the human race, a way of securing a more abundant life which does not simply consist in taking away from someone else.
Karl Taylor Compton
#89. The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.
Michael E. DeBakey
#90. Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.
Abhijit Naskar
#91. By philosophy, history, economics and science, all knowledge and wisdom, humanity may eventually arrive at the awareness of its own oneness.... Sudipta Das
Sudipta Das
#92. 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
#93. When Numa died, Rome by the twin disciplines of peace and war was as eminent for self-mastery as for military power.
Livy
#94. There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.
Ansel Adams
#95. He also telephoned the Real Time Computer Complex on the ground floor of the Operations Wing to ask that an additional big I.B.M. computer be brought onto the line.
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr.
#96. [ ... ] from what I'd been able to ascertain online, the Swiss were a reassuringly practical people. They had a long, proud history of staying out of wars, preferring to devote themselves to more constructive endeavours like science, secure banking and building extremely accurate clocks.
Gavin Extence
#97. The history of breast milk substitutes is a reminder that they've always been needed, but only in very recent human history has science allowed for a safe alternative. That there is even a debate over breast versus bottle is made possible by science.
Alice Callahan
#98. 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
#99. Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.
Joseph Campbell
#100. In the history of medicine and science, no chronic or metabolic disease has been cured by factors foreign to the diet, (or) to biological experience.
Ernst T. Krebs
