Topic
Science is humanity's most reliable method for understanding the natural world — a set of practices, disciplines, and values (evidence, reproducibility, peer review, revision in light of new data) that has produced, over several centuries, a transformation in human knowledge and material possibility without precedent in history. The quotes gathered here celebrate that achievement without lapsing into scientism. The best voices here honor science's power while acknowledging its limits: it describes what is, not what ought to be; it explains mechanism, not meaning; it advances through the willingness to be wrong, which requires the intellectual courage that is rarer than technical ability. These reflections also probe the culture of science — the curiosity that drives it, the discipline that sustains it, the community that corrects it — as much as its findings. Whether you are a scientist, a science enthusiast, or someone trying to think clearly about the relationship between evidence and belief, this collection offers rich and stimulating material.
Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes, I mean the universe, but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.
I have collected many arguments for the purpose of refuting the latter; but I do not venture to bring them to the light of publicity, for fear of sharing the fate of our master, Copernicus, who, although he has earned immortal fame with some, yet with very many has become an object of ridicule and scorn.
This sort of men fancied that philosophy was to be studied like the Aeneid or Odyssey, and that the true reading of nature was to be detected by the collation of texts.