Science Quotes – Insightful Reflections on Research and Knowledge

"For example, if I suspect that there might still be beer in the fridge and I check, then in principle I'm already doing a preliminary form of science. Big difference to theology. In theology, assumptions are not usually tested. So if I just say “there's beer in the fridge”, I'm a theologian. If I look, I'm a scientist. If I look, find nothing and still claim there's beer in it - then I'm an esoteric!"

Vince Ebert

"We have reached the point in our absurdity where distinguished scientists are censored by total dumbshits."

Dr. Robert Malone

"Since we can’t change the way the universe began, the question of whether time travel is possible is one of whether we can subsequently make space–time so warped that one can go back to the past. I think this is an important subject for research, but one has to be careful not to be labelled a crank. If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency could afford to be seen to be spending public money on anything as way out as time travel. Instead one has to use technical terms like closed time-like curves, which are code for time travel. Yet it is a very serious question."

Stephen Hawking

The sensational news that a fundamental particle has been discovered is somewhere between a misuse of language and a lie. What was found did not solve a single problem in physics, and yet was immediately celebrated as the discovery of the century. Whether this was deliberate misdirection, shameless puffery or foolish parroting remains to be seen. [...] The idea of tens of thousands of physicists conducting an unmanageable experiment on a nonsensical theoretical model, seems to prohibit itself. It is too painful to even consider. But this is soberly true. Particle physics is money thrown away.”

Alexander Unzicker

"I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable that happened billions of years ago."

Dr. Ernst Chain

""scientism is where people turn science into a kind of religion. It becomes a kind of dogmatic belief system. The irony is that a lot of people think that religion is dogmatic and science is free-thinking, but actually, in my experience, some of the most dogmatic people I know are people who've made science into a kind of religion. We still have flat earthers, we have people that don't believe in vaccinations, and what do we do about it?""

Rupert Sheldrake

"Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down."

Sir Fred Hoyle

"Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings."

Neil Postman

"So, what you learn when you study science in general, but astrophysics especially, is that you no longer invoke your senses to judge what makes sense, or you no longer invoke your personal philosophies to judge what should be true. The universe is what it is, and it really doesn't care about your senses."

Neil deGrasse Tyson

"There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination."

Denis Diderot

"I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy."

Fred Hoyle

"misguided to ask whether the Big Bang theory would provide evidence for or against a scriptural story of Creation; the Big Bang Theory is a scientific theory, concerned with physical causes that are proximate and contingent. And it’s wrong to ask whether a scriptural story of Creation would provide evidence for or against the Big Bang theory; scriptural stories of Creation are concerned with ultimate origins and with humanity’s personal relationship with God. Those are the wrong questions for the tools at hand."

Guy Consolmagno

"Science doesn't stop when it comes up with a nice answer. It looks for more data. It comes up with new ideas. It's willing to admit it's wrong."

Guy Consolmagno

"Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress"

Paul Feyerabend

"It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers."

Thomas Kuhn

""Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice."

Thomas Kuhn

"Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not."

Allan Bloom

"To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers."

Thomas Kuhn