Scientist Quotes - Page 32

• Girls and boys respond to stress differently - not just in our species, but in every mammal scientists have studied. Stress enhances learning in males. The same stress impairs learning in females.

  Leonard Sax

  Girl, Stress, Boys

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• I think a scientist's job is to explore the Universe, to explore the cosmos around us. People always want to know - why is that useful? Well, on just pure fundamental grounds, on some level it's like art, it's like umm, music, it's aesthetics, it's like philosophy. You want to know where you are in the Universe.

  Brian Schmidt

  Art, Jobs, Philosophy

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• For realists, war is like surgery-a painful and dangerous activity that is sometimes necessary ... A pacifist is like a Christian Scientist who is against surgery even when the alternative is the crippling or death of the patient.

  Michael Lind

  Christian, War, Alternatives

  Michael Lind (2013). “Vietnam: The Necessary War”, p.220, Simon and Schuster

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• God is running the universe. We ought not think like scientists, but think like psalmists.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Running, Thinking, Ought

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• Geometric shapes hold an energy pattern, and scientists did some experiments which say certain geometric shapes can affect matter around them. It's simply because when a human looks at a shape, they instantly receive energy from their brain.

  Tom DeLonge

  Geometric Shapes, Brain, Energy

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• For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.

  Thomas Szasz

  Christian, Men, Issues

  "The Second Sin (Science and Scientism)". Book by Thomas Szasz, 1973.

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• Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Facts, Evolution

  Stephen Jay Gould (1993). “Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history”, Vintage

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• Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Thinking, Psychics, People

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

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• When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophy, Silly, Law

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.310, Harvard University Press

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• Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Self, Vision, Bricks

  "An Urchin in the Storm". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Cardboard Darwinism", p. 27, 1987.

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• Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.

  Simone Weil

  Science, Voiceless

  "On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God". Book by Simone Weil, Translated by R. Rees, "Reflections on quantum theory," p. 57, 1968.

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• In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology".

  Rachel Carson

  Men, Voice, Years

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• Scientists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is life after death -- though they say it's virtually impossible to get decent Chinese food.

  David Letterman

  Doubt, Chinese, Shadow

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• The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Logic, Sometimes, Mistaken

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• The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe 's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly!

  Konrad Lorenz

  Attitude, Real, Men

  "On Aggression". Book by Konrad Lorenz, Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility, 1963.

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• Nothing can better express the feelings of the scientist towards the great unity of the laws of nature than in Immanuel Kant's words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe: the stars above me and the moral law within me."... Would he, who did not yet know of the evolution of the world of organisms, be shocked that we consider the moral law within us not as something given, a priori, but as something which has arisen by natural evolution, just like the laws of the heavens?

  Konrad Lorenz

  Stars, Law, Two

  "On Aggression" by Konrad Lorenz, (Ch. XII), 1963.

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• Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.

  Aldo Leopold

  Weed, Real, Sea

  Aldo Leopold (1968). “A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There”, p.155, Oxford University Press

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• When Arthur Ashe plays tennis, his purpose each day is to play the game in a way he has never played it before. It may be a backhand he uses, one that he may never have used before in that circumstance. His play is a fresh integration of his world at the instant of action. A really great scientist has the whole past at his disposal. At any instant he is rebuilding the world, molecule by molecule, in his subconscious. That is what you want in an athlete or a scientist.

  Edwin Land

  Athlete, Past, Games

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• An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off.

  Edwin Land

  Creativity, Cutting, Government

  "A Genius and His Magic Camera". LIFE magazine, October 27, 1972.

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• There's no scientist I know who wouldn't rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it's great fun!

  Edwin Land

  Fun, Circumstances, Charlatans

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• Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually, as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

  Jacques Monod

  Mean, Thinking, Theory Of Evolution

  "Evolution". Book edited by Mark Ridley, p. 389, 1997.

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• The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we do - what we're really good at, which is - which is theology and morality.

  Rick Santorum

  Thinking, Leaving, Church

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• Scientists tracking mirror neurons noticed that a monkey will get excited not just when holding a banana, but also when seeing someone else holding a banana.

  Sara Genn

  Mirrors, Neurons, Monkeys

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• A data scientist is that unique blend of skills that can both unlock the insights of data and tell a fantastic story via the data.

  DJ Patil

  Unique, Data, Skills

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• Of course I am not religious — I don't in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so.

  Philip Warren Anderson

  Religious, Thinking, Facts

  "More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon". Book by Philip Warren Anderson, 2011.

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