Dans la nature rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd, tout change.In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes.

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,...

Am I right in suggesting that ordinary life is a mean between these extremes, that the noble man devotes his material wealth to lofty ends, the advancement of science, or art, or some such true...

It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another’s learning.

A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he’s often sure he can find one. And that’s a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.

Physical vision – one might say scientific vision – brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer’s view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system,...

Perception is the illusion that gives all matter mass,” The Flight of the Eagle A.K. Luthienne

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the...

Look … first and foremost, I’m a scientist. That means it’s my responsibility to make observations and gather evidence before forming a hypothesis, not vice versa.

In fact, meta- and particle physicists have more in common than one might suppose: both tug, if in slightly different directions, at the knots which hold the cosmos together, both look beyond the immediate world...

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what...

How little we really know about the life all around us. Would we be so cavalier and ruthless with it if we understood it better?

Newton’s laws of physics can rarely be applied to the real world. There is more to life than cause and effect. Things just aren’t that simple

It is the relationship between the physical environment and the environed organism, between physiography and ontography (to coin a term), that constitutes the essential principles of geography today.

Woman study loving him his whole life; Man study loving well, your whole wife

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the...

I don’t want to believe. I want to know.

Freud could never be certain, he said,in view of his wide and early reading,whether what seemed like a new creationmight not be the work insteadof hidden channels of memory leadingback to the notions of others...

Pero ,por qué hemos de empeñarnos en pensar que el universo fue hecho para nosotros? ,Por qué resulta tan atractiva esa idea? ,Por qué seguimos alimentándola? ,Es tan precaria nuestra autoestima que no podemos conformarnos...

No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t...

We stand at the onset of a great age of adventure—and always shall, so long as we keep doing science.

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him...

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities....

El obispo pasa a argüir que ‘el universo ha sido hecho y está gobernado por un propósito inteligente’ y que sería una falta de inteligencia el haber hecho al hombre para que pereciera. Hay muchas...

The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.

Si noti il meraviglioso «Mi sembra…» iniziale, che ricorda l’«Io penso…» con cui Darwin introduce nei suoi taccuini la grande idea che le specie evolvono, o l’«esitazione» di cui parla Faraday quando nel suo libro...

With great power comes great dissipation.

Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called to fill in the gaps that science did not understand.

Wizards don’t believe in gods. They didn’t deny their existence, of course. They just didn’t believe. It was nothing personal; they weren’t actually rude about it. Gods were a visible part of narrativium that made...

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of...

If the hand be held between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself… For brevity’s sake I shall use the...

The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.

Briefly, in the act of composition, as an instrument there intervenes and is most potent, fire, flaming, fervid, hot; but in the very substance of the compound there intervenes, as an ingredient, as it is...

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.

[As a young teenager] Galois read Legendre]’s geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,And fathers live transmitted in their sons;Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,The same their manners, and the same their minds:Till, as erelong successive buds decay,And insect-shoals successive pass...

In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fraulein Noether was the most significant mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.

But in the present century, thanks in good part to the influence of Hilbert, we have come to see that the unproved postulates with which we start are purely arbitrary. They must be consistent, they...

Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means.

Nernst was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and it is said that in a conference concerned with naming units after appropriate persons, he proposed that the unit of rate of liquid flow should be called...

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says...

So many other planets & stars — could all those stars set over barren planets, beauty wasted? Or, are sunsets witnessed throughout the universe?

Mere lack of evidence, of course, is no reason to denounce a theory. Look at intelligent design. The fact that it is bollocks hasn’t stopped a good many people from believing in it. Darwinism itself...

A man that is of Copernicus’ Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlightn’d by the Sun, like the rest of them, cannot but sometimes have a fancy … that...

Mowaljarlai rarely answered questions with an abstract explanation; he always told a story. His was not a fragmented world, divided into the convenient disciplinary languages and jargon that seem to be required for the understanding...

Imagination is cheap as long as you don’t have to worry about the details.

Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.

The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion;...