Scientific Quotations

I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible.
- Sir Fred Hoyle.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to Authority is not using his intelligence, he is just using his memory.
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
- Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
-Galileo Galilei
(Portrait © IMSS - Firenze)

Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
- Erwin Schrödinger 1887-1961

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer in 'Life' October 10, 1949.

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)

If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only show he has not understood the first thing about them.
- Neils Bohr

Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an 'elegant' or 'robust' theory. But it isn't science.
- Halton Arp, 1991, from Science News, Jul 27.

Much as I venerate the name of Newton, I am not obliged to believe that he was infallible. I see ... with regret that he was liable to err, and that his authority has, perhaps, sometimes even retarded the progress of science.
- Thomas Young, (1773-1829)

We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is not evidence ... Where here is evidence, no one speaks of "faith". We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.
- Bertrand Russell, 1955.

... the establishment defends itself by complicating everything to the point of incomprehensibility.
- Sir Fred Hoyle

There is no higher or lower knowledge, but one only, flowing out of experimentation.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another; and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter into their composition? The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.
- Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

If there should chance to be any mathematicians who, ignorant in mathematics yet pretending to skill in that science, should dare, upon the authority of some passage of Scripture wrested to their purpose, to condemn and censure my hypothesis, I value them not, and scorn their inconsiderate judgement.
- Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Coelestibus

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
- Neils Bohr

I don't mind your thinking slowly: I mind your publishing faster than you think.
- Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
- Johann von Neumann, (1903-1957) in G.Zukav The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning.
- Max Planck, (1858-1947) from Scientific Autobiography, 1949.

Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.
- Albert Einstein, Cosmic Religion, 1931.

Scientific Biographies and Quotations.