Science Quotes – Insightful Reflections on Research and Knowledge

"The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith."

Rupert Sheldrake

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement."

Karl Popper

"Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition."

Thomas Kuhn

"In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality."

Karl Popper

"Evolution is not a fact. Evolution doesn't even qualify as a theory or as a hypothesis. It is a metaphysical research program, and it is not really testable science."

Karl Popper

"Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."

Thomas Kuhn

"Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others."

Alan Kay

"Every important idea in science sounds strange at first."

Thomas Kuhn

"Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists."

Thomas Kuhn

"Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments."

Thomas Kuhn

"No particular theory may ever be regarded as absolutely certain.... No scientific theory is sacrosanct."

Karl Popper

"In science novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation."

Thomas Kuhn

"With the insights of modern physics, natural science has reached a point where it must abandon the idea that it could explain everything."

Hans-Peter Dürr

"As such, science stumbles upon an unknowable and mysterious essence that escapes logical explanation and which can be described only in the language of poetry and metaphor."

Mattias Desmet

"Because television doesn't offer the kind of budget that a movie offers, you've got to be a little more careful where you spend the money to put the fiction in science."

Steven Spielberg

"Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to come. It's easier for an audience to take warnings from sci-fi without feeling that we're preaching to them. Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that's worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true."

Steven Spielberg

"There are questions to which people want answers but cannot find them. It is a misconception to think that these questions will disappear as science advances."

Hans-Georg Gadamer

"What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean."

Isaac Newton