Quotes about Scientists

I believe the ultimate aim of all human beings is to obtain happiness and a sense of fulfillment.  These objectives can be achieved through physical amenities and proper mental development,  but the dominant and ultimate factor is the mental aspect.  In order to achieve these objectives one must have knowledge about both mind and matter.

Scientists may study mainly matter but they cannot ignore the human mind, or consciousness: spiritual practitioners may be engaging mainly in developing the mind but they cannot completely ignore their physical needs.

It is for this reason that I have always stressed the importance of combining both mental and the material approach to achieving happiness for humankind.

Scientists willing to risk their reputations on higher dimensions soon found themselves ridiculed by the scientific community. Higher-dimensional space became the last refuge for mystics, cranks, and charlatans.

Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.

There is no room for the dilettante, the weakling, for the shirker, or the sluggard. The mine, the factory, the dockyard, the salt sea waves, the field to till, the home, the hospital, the chair of the scientist, the pulpit of the preacher - from the highest to the humblest tasks, all are of equal honor; all have their part to play.

This is no time to speak of the hopes of the future, or the broader world which lies beyond our struggles and our victory. We have to win that world for our children. We have to win it by our sacrifices. We have not won it yet. The crisis is upon us. . . . In this strange, terrible world war there is a place for everyone, man and woman, old and young, hale and halt; service in a thousand forms is open. There is no room now for the dilettante, the weakling, for the shirker, or the sluggard. The mine, the factory, the dockyard, the salt sea waves, the fields to till, the home, the hospital, the chair of the scientist, the pulpit of the preacher - from the highest to the humblest tasks, all are of equal honor; all have their part to play.

We are American farmers. We are Americans. We are farmers. Our grandsires freed this virgin continent,plowed it from East to West, and gave it to us.This land is for us and for our children tomake richer and more fruitful. We grow foods, fibers - fifteen times asmuch as we use. We grow men and women -- farmers, Presidents, and Senators, generals of industry,captains of commerce, missionaries, builders. Communists would call us capitalists, because we own land and we own tools. Capitalists might choose to call us laborers,because we work with our hands. Others may call us managers, because wedirect men and manage materials. Our children call us "Dad." We are also deacons, stockholders, mechanics, veterinarians, electricians, schoolboard members, Rotarians, voters, scientists,neighbors, men of good will. Our rules are Nature's rules, the laws of God. We command the magic of the seasons andthe miracles of science, because we obey Nature's rules. Our raw materials are soil and seed, animals, the atmosphere and the rain, and the mighty sun. We work with brains. We toil with musclesof steel, fed by the fires of lightning and byoils from the inner earth. We are partners with the laboratory, withthe factory, and with all the people. We provide industry with ever-renewableraw materials from the inexhaustible world ofplants. We buy products from the labor ofevery fellow-citizen.Our efficiencies have raised great cities andhappy towns, and have given all the peoplemeat and bread. We believe in work and in honor We believe in freedom. We are grateful for the American freedomthat has let us earn so many blessings. We know that liberty is our most preciouspossession. At the ballot-boxes and on thebattlefield we shall defend it. We have proven a new pattern of abun-dance. We pray that we may also help tomake a pattern for peace.

The paleontological evidence before us today clearly demonstrates ordered progressive change with the successive development of new faunal and floral assemblages through the changing epochs of our earth's history. There should be no real conflict between science, which is the search for truth, and Christ's teachings, which I hold to be truth itself. It is only when scientists remove God from creation that the Christian is faced with an irreconcilable situation.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Scientists develop models rather than divining truth, they provide services to engineering rather than a priesthood, and they clarify and formalize they models they build.

A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work.

Literary intellectuals at one pole-at the other scientists. . . . Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematize what it reveals. He arrives at two generalizations: (1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures have gills. These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it. In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science. An onlooker may object that the first generalization is wrong. "There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them." The icthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. "Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of icthyological knowledge. In short, "what my net can't catch isn't fish." Or-to translate the analogy-"If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unverifiable by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah!"

The last thing a scientist would do is cling to a map because he inherited it from his grandfather, or because it was used by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

Science, being human enquiry, can hear no answer except an answer couched somehow in human tones. Primitive man stood in the mountains and shouted against a cliff; the echo brought back his own voice, and he believed in a disembodied spirit. The scientist of today stands counting out loud in the face of the unknown. Numbers come back to him - and he believes in the Great Mathematician.

The scientists split the atom; now the atom is splitting us.

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.

No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. "And relationships," he had told her, "contained the essential meaning of life."

There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. . . . Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness. .. Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.

Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals -- the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.

The longer you garden the better the eye gets, the more tuned to how colors vibrate in different ways and what they can do to each other. You become a scientist as well as an artist, with the lines between increasingly blurred.

There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down error instead of establishing the truth.

The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.

Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.

A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work is the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.

The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part plowman. He modifies the climate around his home.

One can forget the meaninglessness of his own existence by occupying himself with scientific experiments of dubious import. Countless scientists and scholars spend their lives in the search of truths that are irrelevant to them.

(Concerning the allocation of research funds) It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists) . . . despise utility. But because . . . useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.