REFLECTIONS ON SCIENCE AND RESEARCH

• This is not a bad definition of the aim of all true science; the aim of rejoicing in the splendid mysteries of the world and universe we live in, and of attempting so to understand those mysteries that we can improve our command over nature, improve our conditions of life and so ensure peace.
  E. A. Milne (Rouse Ball Professor, Oxford)

• Science ... is not to be regarded merely as a storehouse of facts to be used for material purposes, but as one of the great human endeavours to be ranked with arts and religion as the guide and expression of man's fearless quest for truth.
  Sir Richard Gregory (Former editor, Nature)

• The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving to be right.
  Karl Popper

• The erroneous belief that science eventually leads to the certainty of a definitive explanation carries with it the implication that it is a grave scientific misdemeanour to have published some hypothesis that eventually is falsified. As a consequence scientists have often been loath to admit the falsification of such an hypothesis, and their lives may be wasted in defending the no longer defensible. Whereas according to Popper, falsification in whole or in part is the anticipated fate of all hypotheses, and we should even rejoice in the falsification of an hypothesis we have cherished as our brainchild. One is therefore relieved from fears and science becomes an exhilarating adventure where imagination and vision lead to conceptual developments transcending ... the experimental evidence.
  Sir John Eccles

• Chemistry, that most excellent child of intellect and art. Chemistry provides not only a mental discipline, but an adventure and an aesthetic experience. Its followers seek to know the hidden causes which underlie the transformations of our changing world, to learn the essence of the rose's colour, the lilac's fragrance, and the oak's tenacity, and to understand the secret paths by which sunlight and the air create these wonders. And to this knowledge they attach an absolute value, that of truth and beauty.
  Sir Cyril Hinshelwood

• I shall re-examine here the suppositions underlying our belief in science, and propose to show that they are more extensive than is usually thought. They will appear to co-extend with the entire spiritual foundations of man, and go to the very root of his social existence. Hence, I will urge, our belief in science should be regarded as a token of much wider convictions.
  Michael Polanyi

• The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.
  Albert Einstein (1955)

• Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
  Albert Einstein (1950)

• When one has sought long for the clue to a secret of nature, and is rewarded by grasping some part of the answer, it comes as a blinding flash of revelation: it comes as something new, more simple and at the same time more aesthetically satisfying than anything one could have created in one's own mind. This conviction is of something revealed, and not something imagined.
  Sir Lawrence Bragg

• This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle: wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whoever will think of it.
  Thomas Carlyle (1841)

• I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
  Isaac Newton

• The Universe is made of things which do not appear.
  Bible, NT, Hebrews

• Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.
  J. Bronowski (1956)

• One by one the solid scholars Get degrees, the jobs, the dollars
  W. D. Snodgrass (1959)

• The fool knows after he's suffered.
  Hesiod (8th. century BC)