Science Quotes – Insightful Reflections on Research and Knowledge

""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

"As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice-there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community... this issue of paradigm choice can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone."

Thomas Kuhn

"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

"The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science."

John Francis Clauser

"My work is about the effect of the sun on climate, and if the sun has a decisive influence on climate, that means that the influence of CO2 is smaller. That doesn't fit with the narrative that CO2 is supposed to be such a dominant factor in global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a UN organization that admits members based on area, political affiliation, and in some cases merit. My work is in fact ignored by it. In the Climategate emails, that went public in 2011, I noticed an email discussing possible authors for the IPCC's fifth assessment report. One qualification for an author had to be that he was 'anti-Svensmark'."

Henrik Svensmark

"Studying the universe engages us in something bigger than ourselves. Science tries to describe, in terms we can only grasp intuitively, things that are beyond our intuition. . . . all we can hope for is that our physical descriptions, like a song or a good painting, are a faithful evocation of some ineffable truth."

Guy Consolmagno

"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreshadowing of an America in the time of my children or grandchildren – when the United States is a service and information economy; when Almost all major manufacturing industries have moved to other countries; when terrible technological powers are in the hands of too few, and no one representing the public interest can understand the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agenda. Lost or deliberately questioned by those in power; when, holding our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our vital faculties decline, in distinguishing between what feels good and what is true Unable, we go back to superstition and darkness, almost without noticing.

America’s downfall is most evident in the slow decay of real content in the most influential media, 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), credible presentations on lowest common denominator programming, pseudoscience and superstition, but especially From a kind of celebration of ignorance."

Dr. Carl Edward Sagan