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SCIENCE

 

"Few of us realize how short the career of what we know as "science" has been."

William James

 

 

"Man has mounted science, and is now run away....science will be the master of man....Some day science may have the existence of man in its power, and the human race may commit suicide by blowing up the world."

-Henry Adams

 

 

"....I think, best approach the heart of the problem by taking a concrete instance, going back in our minds to the time, some sixty years ago, when the Curies announced the discovery of radium. At that moment (though we have perhaps forgotten it) physicists found themselves faced with a puzzling dilemma. How were they, in fact, to try to understand this new element? In the discovery of this strange substance was science confronted with a particularly aberrant form of mater, or, on the contrary, with a new state of matter? or, on the contrary, with a new state of matter? Was it an anomaly, or a paroxysm? Had they simply found one more rarity for the curious to add to their collections, or did it mean that a completely new physics would have to be constructed?"

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man's Place in Nature

 

"Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?"

-Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

"To most of the modern literary critics-probably because of their almost incredible ignorance of scientific thought-the so-called scientist is a "mere rationalist," and science is held, in respect to art, as photography is to painting."

Hanz Zinsser

Rats, Lice And History

 

"Let both sides sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tape the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce."

-John F. Kennedy

 

"Newton's famous hypotheses non fingo_"I do not fabricate hypotheses"-is very nearly the opposite of Descartes' cognito ergo sum."

 

 

"You are the scientist of your life."

-Joan C. King

The Code of Authentic Living: cellular wisdom

 

 

"Charles Fort is an inspired clown who, to the accompaniment of a gigantic snare drum, has bounded into the arena of science and let fly at the pontifical sets of wisdom with a slapstick and bladder. he has plucked the false whiskers off the planets. He has reinvented a god. He has exposed the immemorial hoax that bears the name of sanity. In the light of all reason he stands-a gibbering idiot thumbing his nose at the awful presence of world intelligence.

   Is it true? Has science, by a process of maniacal exclusion of tell tale data, foisted an algebraic Mother Goose upon the world in the name of astronomy? Laughter-the immemorial laughter of today's sanity-answers."

-Ben Hecht, reviewing books for the Chicago Daily News

 

 

"Science Mocked," the New York Tribune titled its book review, of Fort's book

   "In the middle ages, science disposed of disturbing facts by declaring that they did not exist and showing that Aristotle had no record of them. Mr Fort's phenomena cannot be disposed of so easily. Unless his book is smothered by a conspiracy of silence, it should provoke an extremely lively series of scientific controversies."

 

"Science is not a process of discovering the ultimate truths of nature, but a social construction that changes over time..."

-Carolyn Merchant

 

"The conclusion is inescapable," wrote Paul A. Boghossian, a professor of philosophy at New York University, "that the editors of Social Text didn't know what many of the sentences in Sokal's essay actually meant; and that they just didn't care." What they cared about was ideology, In the end, the postmodernist brew of socialism and cynicism was literally perverse-in the etymological sense of the word, as meaning to look in the wrong direction. Rather than pursuing knowledge about science, radical academics assumed a posture that the mathematician Norman Levitt calls "knowingness, an attitude that gives itself permission to avoid the pain and difficulty of actually understanding science simply by declaring in advance that knowledge is futile or illusory."

-Timothy Ferris

The Science of Liberty

 

 

"They say it takes three generations to learn how to cut a diamond, a lifetime to learn how to make a watch and that only three people in the entire world ever fully comprehended Einstein's Theory of Relativity. But football coaches to a man are convinced that none of the above is comparable in complexity to playing quarterback in the NFL. I mean, watches don't mix up defenses on you, diamonds don't blitz and Einstein had all day to throw E=mc2  and it doesn't rotate coverage's."

-Los Angeles Times Sports Report

 

"Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button sorters."

-Robert Heinlein

 

"A typical scientific paper has never pretended to be more than another little piece of a larger jigsaw-not significant in itself but as an element in a grander scheme."

-Lewis Thomas

 

 

"Now, if you think that science is an abstract subject free of sensationalism and distortions, I have some sobering news. Empirical researchers have found evidence that scientists too are vulnerable to narratives, emphasizing titles and "sexy" attention-grabbing punch lines over more substantive matters. They too are human and get their attention from sensational matters. The way to remedy this is through meta-analyses of scientific studies, in which an uberresearcher peruses the entire literature, which includes the less-advertised articles, and produces a synthesis."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

 

 

"Experiments rarely tell us what we expect. That's the dirty secret of science."

-Kevin Dunbar  (Director of the Laboratory for Complex Thinking and Reasoning, University of Toronto)

 

  "The revolution of modern science and especially medical science began as science not only focused on this answer to "What can I know?" but more importantly, changed its method of inquiry, changed its answer to "How can I know it?"

-John M. Barry

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

 

'WHAT CAN I KNOW? HOW CAN I KNOW IT?

 

"The technique of soliciting many modest contributions to the store of human knowledge has been the secret of Western science since the seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate collective power that is far greater than any one individual can exert."

-Ziman

 

 

"I want to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details."

-Einstein

 

 

"Both the man of science and

the man of art live always

at the edge of mystery."

-Oppenheimer

 

"The tragedy of man is that he has developed an intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to penetrate them."

-Hans Zinsser Rats, Lice and History

 

 

Stigler's Law: No Scientific discovery gets named for its original discover

 

"In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs"

-Sir William Osler

 

 

"Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own"

Francis Bacon (New Organon)

 

"It was clear to me for a long time that the origins of science had their deep roots in a particular myth, that of invariance."

Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Deschend

Hamlet's Mill

 

"The idea that God....is not a being of caprice and whim, as had been the case in all the main body of thinking of the ancient world, but is instead a God who rules through through law.....That idea has made modern science and it is unquestionably the foundation of modern civilization."

-Robert A. Millikan

 

"Science is godless in  the same  way that plumbing is godless."

-Robert Pennoc (Michigan State University Science philosopher)

 

    "The natural sciences are acclaimed as recent developments in human history. It is commonly believed that they are solely a European invention. The sciences supposedly developed as a direct result of the Renaissance era, when rational thought overcame the dogma of religion. While the Greeks are regarded as the originators of the principles of modern science, the enlightened scholars of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance period are credited with refining these principles into true science. This is what is currently taught in the school systems in the United States and throughout the rest of the Western world."

   Dr. Kasem Khaleel

The Arabian Connection

 

   "Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together, though the Hindu hypothesis was far less rigorous than Newton's. The Sanskrit-speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one. The Indians of the fifth century A.D. somehow calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years; scientists in nineteenth-century England were convinced it was 100 million years (The modern estimate is 4.6 billion years.) Chinese scholars in the fourth century A.D.-like Arabs in the thirteenth century and the Papuans of New Guinea later on-routinely used fossils to study the history of the planet; yet at Oxford University in the seventeenth century some faculty members continued to teach that fossils were "false clues sown by the devil" to deceive man. quantitative chemical analyses set down in the K'ao kung chi, an eleventh-century B.C. Chinese text, are never more than 5 percent off when compared to modern figures."

Dick Teresi

Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science-from the Babylonians to the Maya

 

 

   "In 1915 about the time, according to Otto Neugebauer, that the Germans were rewriting their encyclopedias to edit out the Phoenicians from Greek History, the English science historian G.R. Kaye admonished "western investigators in the history of knowledge" to look for "traces of Greek influence" because the "achievements of the Greeks" form "the most wonderful chapters in the history of civilization." Our pop science historians-Bronowski, Daniel Boorstin, Carl Sagan, et al.-have certainly been faithful to that directive. Western Historians have also criticized past non-Western scientists, such as the Maya and Egyptians, for their strange religious beliefs, implying that acute religiosity disqualifies the work of a scientist. Then again, when Pythagoras finally proved "his" theorem, he offered a hundred oxen to the Muses in thanks."

Dick Teresi

Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science-from the Babylonians to the Maya

 

 

"There is a crying need for a popular understanding of modern science in our culture."

Leon Lederman( Nobel Prize winner)

 

"In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity."

-H.G. Wells

 

"Science....means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development towards an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which intellect can never fully grasp."

-Max Planck

 

 

"Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on  the other hand, operates in  the equally important, but utterly different realm of human purposes, meanings, and values-subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve....Science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven."
 

-Stephen Jay Gould

Rock of Ages

 

 

"What is Science? ....Learn from science that you must doubt the experts....Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

-Richard Feynman

 

 

"Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it....Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics-indeed, of modern science altogether."

-Einstein

 

"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life....There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in tghe repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter."

-Rachel Carson

The Sense of Wonder

 

 

"Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: "On to God!"

-Max Planck

 

   "  In science and technology we have created a self-propelling machine we can't turn off, however, and like the sorcerer's apprentice, we are overwhelmed by forces unleashed through our arrogance and ignorance. Every brilliant solution our technology and science have thus far presented has set up a counterwave of quiet, subtle, slow, and patient destruction, just as religions rapidly give rise to noisy and turbulent violence."

-Joseph Chilton Pearce

The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit

 

 

"Man has mounted science and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world."

-Henry Adams in a letter to his brother, April 11, 1862

 

 

"With the monstrous weapons man already has, humanity is in danger of being trapped in this world by its moral adolescents. Our knowledge of science has already outstripped our capacity to control it. We have many men of science, too few men of God."

-Gen. Omar Bradley in an address in Boston, November 10, 1948

 

 

"We must first extend the boundaries of inquiry for modern science, extend our concept of what is possible for man."

-Robert Ornstein

 

"The size of the universe is very impressive, with us on a tiny particle whirling around the sun, among a hundred thousand million  suns in this galaxy, itself among a billion galaxies....There are atoms of which all appears to be constructed, following immutable laws. Nothing can escape it: the stars are made of the same stuff, and the animals are made of the same stuff, but in such complexity as to mysteriously appear alive-like man himself....To see life as part of the universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is rarely described. It usually ends in laughter, delight in the futility of trying to understand These scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty..."

-Richard Feynman

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

 

 

"Attacks against science are likely to become more bitter and more widespread in the future, as long as the economic inequities in our society remain sharp and science continues to be predominantly engaged in building toys for the rich. To forestall such attacks, whether or not we feel guilt for the sins of society, the scientific community should invest heavily in projects that benefit all segments of our population....What is needed is a major commitment of scientific resources to the development of new technology that will bring our derelict cities and derelict children back to life. If our profession does not put its heart into such a commitment, then we shall deserve the passionate hatred that we shall sooner or later encounter."

-Freeman J. Dyson 'Science in Trouble," Autumn 1993

 

 

   "You'll find the odd congressman like Al Gore who will sit down with the boffins and say, explain it to me," said Daniel S. Greenberg, author of "Science, Money and Politics" (2001), and for many years the editor of the newsletter Science and Government Report. "But if you look at the voting, it's mostly along party lines." He added, "I don't think many congressmen could answer 10 basic questions" about science."

article in New York Times, Jan 31,2006  "Where Science and Public Policy Intersect, Researchers Offer a Short Lesson Basics" by Cornelia Dean 

 

"When asked by practical men of affairs for reasons which would justify the investment of large sums of money in researches in pure science, he was quite able to grasp their point of view and cite cogent reasons and examples whereby industry and humanity could be seen to have direct benefits from such work. But his own motive he expressed time and again....in five short words, "It is such good fun."

-H.B. Lemon on A.A. Michelson

 

"....poetry of many kinds....gave me a pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. but now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for pictures or music.....My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend. I cannot conceive.....The lost of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

-from Autobiography of Charles Darwin

 

 

"Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting."

-Thomas Huxley

 

"Nothing tends so much to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate; these waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues."

Edmund Burke 'On the Sublime and Beautiful

 

"The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments and they wander off through equation after equation and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

-Nikola Tesla

Modern Mechanix and Inventions, July 1934

 

"The hostility to science, in the face of its obvious triumphs and benefits, is….evidence that it is something outside the mainstream of human development, perhaps a fluke."

Alan Cromer

Uncommon sense: The Heretical Nature of Science

 

 

 "Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business."

-William Shakespeare

 

 

" A Global Scheme! Ah knew it!" Dixon beginning to scream, "what'd Ah tell thee?"

 "Get a grip on yerrself, man," mutters Mason, "what happen'd to 'We're men of Science?"

  "And Men of Science," cries Dixon, "may be but the simple Tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a Hammer knows of a House."

-Thomas Pynchon

Mason & Dixon

 

 

   "It is often said that modern science has "disenchanted" nature, stripping it of demons and divinities, making it mechanistic, devoid of moral lessons and, above all, amenable to explanation. But having disenchanted nature-rendering it fully comprehensible and empty of meaning-science itself could hardly avoid disenchantment as well..."

Ken Alder

The Measure of All things

 

 

"All human science is but the increment of the power of the eye."

-John Fiske The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin, 1884

 

 

"Science….has become an industry supported by large monopolies and by the state. Imperceptibly, this has altered the character of science."

J.D. Bernal

The Social Functions of Science

 

"Modern Science is essentially political."

Stuart S. Blume

 

"Dull wittedness and Tyranny reign not only in police stations. I also see them in science..."

Checkhov (To Alexei Pleshcheyev 4 Oct 1888)

 

 

"Scientists in their quest for certitude and proof tend to reject the marvelous."

Jacques Cousteau

 

"The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will."

-Dixy Lee Ray

 

  "How often does this "Eureka phenomenon" happen? How often is there this flash of deep insight during a moment of relaxation, this triumphant cry of "I've got it! I've got it!" which must surely be a moment of the purest ecstasy this sorry world can afford?

   I wish there were some way we could tell. I suspect that in the history of science it happens often' I suspect that very few significant discoveries are made by the pure technique of voluntary thought; I suspect that voluntary thought may possibly prepare the ground (if even that), but that the final touch, the real inspiration, comes when thinking is under involuntary control.

   But the world is in a conspiracy to hide that fact. Scientists are wedded to reason, to the meticulous working out of consequences from assumptions, to the careful organization of experiments designed to check those consequences. If a certain line of experiments ends nowhere, it is omitted from the final report. If an inspired guess turns out to be correct, it is not reported as an inspired guess. Instead, a solid line of voluntary thought is invented after the fact to lead up to the thought, and that is what is inserted in the final report."

   The result is that anyone reading scientific papers would swear that nothing took place but voluntary thought maintaining a steady clumping stride from origin to destination, and that just can't be true."

-Isaac Asimov

The Left Hand of the Electron

 

 

""It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human. Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those why which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them."

-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason 1794-1795

 

 

"Scientists go through an anti-religious, anti-spiritual brainwashing,…if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist."

Donella Meadows (1941-2001)

 

 

"It is all over for priests and gods when man becomes scientific . Moral: science is the forbidden as such-it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, seed of all sin, the original sin."

-Nietzsche

 

"In these "enlightened Times" science intellectually suffocates anyone who won’t play the game their way. Supported by a kind of academic and industrial mafia, Big Science has the money and power to enforce its edicts."

Joseph F. Goodavege

Magic: Science of the Future

 

"With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries-certainly a grand adventure."

Richard Feynman

What do you care what other people think?

 

 

"The price of gaining….an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense."

Richard Feynman

 

"But a theory which better explains the facts is not necessarily true."

-Nikola Tesla

 

"What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all?

Thomas Kuhn

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

 

"There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be very near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature."

Stephen Hawkin

 

"It is the Arabs who should be regarded as the real founders of physics."

Humboldt

 

"Armed with full knowledge of the nature of space, time, matter, and the workings of the forces of nature, as well as a full understanding of the nature of the gene and of life on earth, what might we wished to do with such knowledge? After all, this level of knowledge is the goal of scientific endeavor, if it isn’t, what are scientists aiming at? The point is that the genie of understanding is already halfway out of the magic lamp and is reminding us that we called."

Gerrit L. Verschuur

Hidden Attraction…The mystery and History of Magnetism

 

 

"Our vision of nature is undergoing a radical change toward the multiple, the temporal, and the complex. For a long time the mechanistic views dominated Western science. In this view the world appeared as a vast automaton. We now understand that we live in a pluralistic world."

Ilya Priogogine (Nobel prize winner)

Order out of Chaos

 

"Scientists, curiously, talk a lot about luck. As murderously as the work, as dedicated as they are to rigor, as much as they believe in their own perfection, they concede that great scientific careers are almost always favored by something else: great timing or an unseen hand connecting the observer and the observed."

Barry Werth

The Billion Dollar Molecule

 

 

"There is no credit in now knowing what can be known. Some literary men....positively pride themselves on their ignorance of science; they are fools and arrogant at that....Chaucer would have regarded such persons with pity and contempt."

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

 

 

"Horrible people, these scientists!"

Henrik Ibsen

 

"A scientist will never show any kindness for a theory which he did not start himself."

-Mark Twain

 

STIGLER'S LAW: No Scientific discovery gets named for its original discoverer

 

"Thus the sciences crept in by stealth, along with other banes of human life, and from the very sources whence all evils flow-devils, let us say. Even the name you call them shows this, for "daemons" means "those who know"-societies."

Erasmus

In Praise of Folly

 

"But problems are like the Hydra of the myth of Herakles; cut off one head and two more sprout. Scientists and engineers have, by using their intelligence, solved some human problems. But the solutions themselves have given rise to still greater problems- nationalism, nuclear war, population explosion, and degenerative mutation pressure, to name but a few. If civilization is to last, and the problems are not to grow beyond all coping, the rest of mankind, and not just the scientists and engineers, will have to use intelligence also, and more than they have so far."

-L. Sprague De Camp

The Ancient Engineers

 

 

"...If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values."

Oppenheimer

 

"My experience with science, then, led me to God-it was as if I was putting on God."

Werner Von Braun

 

"I consider it one of the greatest tragedies of our times that this equally stupid and dangerous error is so widely believed….Science and religion are not antagonists, on the contrary they are sisters. While science tries to learn more about the Creation, religion tries to better understand the Creator. Speaking for myself, I can only say that the grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm my belief in the certainty of a Creator."

Werner Von Braun

 

"Almost everything written today about science is hopelessly out of date. Do scientists seek the truth? No. It is far more accurate to say that they seek understanding. Is science about objectivity? No. It is about evidence, argument, persuasion, and ultimately about power. Is science about numbers? Not really. It is about relationships. Was Einstein a genius? Genius is the mystification of accomplishment."

Joseph Schwartz

The Creative Moment

 

"Hardly anyone can understand the importance of an idea, it is so remarkable. Except that, possibly, some children catch on. And when a child catches on to an idea like that, we have a scientist....It's too late for them to get the spirit when they are in our universities, so we must attempt to explain these ideas to children."

-Richard Feynman

 

"I've learned that you can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk."

-(Anonymous 7-year-old)

 

"In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought!"

-Carl Sagan

 

"If scientific discovery has not been an unalloyed blessing, if it has conferred on mankind the power not only to create but also to annihilate, it has at the same time provided humanity with a supreme challenge and a supreme testing."

John Kennedy

A recent survey conducted for the scientific journal Nature discovered that 39% of scientists (biologists, mathematicians, physicists, astronomers) believed in a personal God. (among psychiatrists only 6% believe in God)

 

"WE are confronting a new level of evolutionary continuity. Now we must include in science the principles of consciousness, freedom, and values. Such a morally responsible position would increase respect among the peoples of the world, many of whom have something to teach others in these important matters. This would enable us to see the beam in our own eyes before crusading or resorting to military action to remove our neighbors motes. A commitment of such mutual respect among the peoples of the world would show us the way in which historically consciousness, freedom, and values have become indispensable for the survival of both humanity and the earth. Humanity is in a position of crises, precarious, threatened by mutual destruction. We are summoned to preserve life and to devote all our efforts to this end."

J.B.S. Haldane

Biography of an idea

 

"Modern science was largely conceived of as an answer to the servant problem and that its entirely practiced by those who lack a flair for conservation. '

 

 

"Science is not a meaningless abstraction, unrelated to human life. Like art, literature, music, religion, it is the pursuit of an 'other-ness' that connects us to some obscure source of power inside ourselves."

Colin Wilson

The Philosophers Stone

 

"The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and value that rational knowledge is suppose to eliminate, is none other than science itself.'

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

 

 

"In the temple of science are many mansions. . .and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; Many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian reasons. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of  the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside... if the types He have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can carve a wood consisting of nothing but creepers. .. Those who have found favor with the angels. . .are somewhat odd, uncommunicative solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple. . .no single answer applies.. Many come to escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless weariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the lab which is where the eye ranged freely through the still impure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity." - --

--Einstein

 

 

 

The universe begins to look more like a GREAT THOUGHT than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm."

Sir James Jeans

 

 

 

"For what if our modern science has as little truth as that of the primitive shaman? Or as little as the science of the early Greeks? Does it not follow that the appearance of power and control conferred by modern science is an illusion? That the intellectual authority of our scientists is little more than a sham? What have we really accomplished other than to be able to kindle a crude atomic fire in the darkness; a fire from which we are compelled to run away like children when sparks fly, as at Sellafield, Three Mile Island or Chernobyl?"

Richard Milton

Forbidden Science

 

 

"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He forgoes the world of experience and thus to overcome it...He makes life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow Whirlpool of personal experience. .. The supreme task...is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path of these laws; only intuition, resting On sympathetic understanding or experience, can reach them..."

Einstein

To the Physicist (1820) Goethe

(translated by Michael Hamburger)

 

"Into the core of Nature"-

0 philistine-

"No earthly mind can enter."

The maxim is fine;

But have the grace

To spare the dissenter,

Me and my kind .

We think: in every place

We' re at the center.

"Happy the mortal creature

To whom she shows no more

Than the outer rind,"

For sixty years I've heard your sort announce.

It makes me swear, though quietly;

To myself a thousand times I say:

All things she grants, gladly and lavishly;

Nature has Neither core

Nor outer rind,

Being all things at once.

It's yourself you should scrutinize to see

Whether you're center or periphery."

Goethe

 

"Theoretical scientists, inching away from the safe and known, skirting the point of no return, confront nature with a free invention of the intellect. They strip the discovery down and wire it into place in the form of mathematical models or other abstractions that define the perceived relation exactly. The now-naked idea is scrutinized with as much coldness and outward lack of pity as the naturally warm human heart can muster. They try to put it to use, devising experiments or field observations to test its claims. By the rules of scientific procedure it is then either discarded or temporarily sustained. Either way, the central theory encompassing it grows. If the abstractions survive they generate new knowledge from which further exploratory trips of the mind can be planned. Through the repeated alternation between flights of the imagination and the accretion of hard data, a mutual agreement on the workings of the world is written, in the form of natural law."

-Edward O. Wilson  'The Drive to Discovery," 

 

"All boundaries between science and religion, science and art, objective and subjective, quantity and quality, physics and psychology, astronomy and religion, God and Ether, are irrevocably breaking down, being replaced by a conception of the basic unity  a basic common functioning principle (CFP) of all nature which branches out into the various kinds of human experience."

Wilhelm Reich

Selected Writings

Farrar,Straus & Giroux

N.Y. (p-426)

 

"When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuation, of the material creation."

Emerson

 

 

"Thus science, as it leads men further and further from the first world they inhabited, the world we call natural, into a new and unguessed domain, is beguiling them."

Loren Eisley

 

 

"In simple terms, the rise of a scientific society means a society of constant expectations directed toward the on-coming future. What we have is always second best, what we expect to have is 'progress' . What we seek, in the end, is UTOPIA. In the mindless pursuit of the future we have ended by engaging to destroy the present."

Loren Eisley

The Invisible Pyramid

 

 

"In the extravagant pursuit of a future projected by science, we have left the present to shift for itself. We have regarded science as a kind of twentieth-century substitute for magic, instead of as a new and burgeoning social institution whose ways are just as worthy of objective study as our political or economic structures. In short, the future has become our primary obsession. We constantly treat our scientists as sooth-sayers and project upon them questions involving the destiny of man over prospects of Billions of years."

Loren Eisley

 

 

"-Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, preemptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind;-not of manners, perhaps; they may be soft and smooth, but the smile they carry has a quiet assertion in it"

Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

 

"Science has created a world to which man does not belong."

Dr. Alexis Carrel

 

 

"It is one of the more profound ironies of the history of thought that the growth of mechanical science, through which arose the idea of mechanism as a possible philosophy of nature, was itself an outcome of the Renaissance magical tradition. Mechanism divested of magic became the philosophy which was to oust Renaissance animism and to replace the 'conjuror' by the mechanical philosopher."

Frances A. Yates

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

Shamballa Pub

 

 

"The evil reality of lawless applied science (which is Magic' s son and heir) is actually reducing large tracts of Nature To disorder and sterility at this very moment."

C.S. Lewis

The Joyful Christian

 

 

"Perhaps the growth of science has been the destruction of life, and as J.H. Plumb once wrote in another context, "An epoch that *started ten thousand years ago is ending. "

William Woods

A History of the Devil

 

 

The religion of. science has its miracles (feeding, healing, destruction) has its church--The Communist Party a priesthood -

"The scientific method of analyzing, explaining and classifying has become conscious of its human limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of its investigation. In other words, method and object can no longer be separated. The scientific world view has ceased to be a scientific view in the true sense of the word." "

Werner Heisenberg

 

 

"Science is not indeed a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when it is taken as an end in itself. Science must serve; it errs when it usurps the throne. It must be ready to serve all its branches, for each, because of its insufficiency, has need of support from the others. Science is the tool of the western mind, and with it one can open more doors than with . bare hands. It is part and parcel of our understanding, and the understanding it conveys is the only kind there is."

C.G. Jung

The Secret of the Golden Flower

 

 

"Much of the darkness, perplexity, and loss of sanity in the modern world, perhaps even the vast increase in the number of neurotic individuals and nervous breakdowns in our time, can be traced back ultimately to that loss of faith in the existence of any purpose or plan in the world-process which has been one of the major results of the work of the mainly devout and pious men who were the founders of modern science, Sensitive scientific men may protest that not science, but misunderstandings of science, have been the source of the modern Weltanschauung. This is quite true. We have been at pains to insist that the conclusions drawn from science do not follow from it by any correct logic. That many of those who have drawn these conclusions have themselves been men of science makes no difference. It is childish to ask whose fault it is. We are not concerned either with blaming science or with relieving it from blame."

W.T. Stace

Religion & the Modern Mind

Keystone Books

 

 

"The first and outstanding fact is that the honeymoon between man and science is over. One of the turning points appears to have  been the development of the H-bomb. Mary Williams, in the survey I have mentioned, did in fact discover what she called 'an explosion of interest in death’ in the late l95O';she attributes this to the 'threat of total annihilation raised by the H-bomb and the atmospheric tests on both sides' . The presence of the H-bomb seems to have forced people to realize that death can indeed once more cover the earth with giant strides, that genocide is a real possibility in our own lifetime, and that science is, after all, a whore who will lie as readily with murder and death as with health and life."

Dying & Creating

Rosemary Gordon

The Library of Analytical Psychology

 

 

"It is certainly not without irony that those whom public opinion has persistently held to be the least practical and the least political members of society should have turned out to be the only ones left who still know how to act and to act in concert. For their early organizations, which they founded in the seventeenth century for the conquest of nature and in which they developed their own moral standards and their own code of honor, have not only survived all vicissitudes of the modern age, but they have become one of the most potent power-generating groups in all history, But the action of the scientists, since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the universe and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence. In this existentially most important aspect, action, too, has become an experience for the privileged few, and these few who still know what it means to act may well be even fewer than the artists, their experience even rarer than the genuine experience of and love for the world."

Hannah Arendt

 

 

"I am suggesting that the implications of modern physics go far beyond technology; that the way--or Tao--of physics can be a way to spiritual knowledge and self-realization."

Fritjof Capra

Saturday Review

Dec 10,1977 Author of Tao of Physics

The Movement vs . The Establishment The Nation June 22,1970 pp. 750-751

 

 

(Steve McKinney just after he set the world ski record )(124.34 M.P.H.)

"Sometimes we must defer our thirst for scientific proof to acceptance of something deeper. When we don't know, we must trust the wisdom of God's plan. The moment before the plunge to a speed record are moments full of this trust. To go without it is literally to take your life in your hands."

Steve McKinney

 

 

"The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgments of scientists 'qua' scientists is not primarily their lack of "character"-that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons-or their naiveté-that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use-but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power."

Hannah Arendt

The Human Condition

 

 

 

"Our own belief is that science erases what was previously true. The earth 'was' the center of the universe until Copernicus rearranged it. Life 'did' begin in Eden before Darwin restyled it."

John McPhee

Oranges

 

 

" "Our mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, one which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive...The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

Darwin

 

 

This impoverishment, so movingly described by Darwin, will overwhelm our entire civilization if we permit the current tendencies to continue which Gibson calls "The extension of positive science to social facts." All divergent problems can be turned into convergent problems by a process of "reduction." The result, however, is the loss of all higher forces to ennoble human life, and the degradation not only of the emotional part of our nature, but also, as Darwin sensed, of our intellect and moral character. The signs are everywhere visible today.-

 

E.F. Schumacher

 

 

"I believe in God.,. who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of the universe. I believe that Intelligence is manifested through- out all Nature. 'any basis of scientific work is the conviction that the world is an ordered and comprehensible entity and not a thing of chance . "

Einstein

 

 

"We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds . "

Sir James Jeans

The Mysterious Universe

 

 

"The material world, which has been taken for a world of blind Mechanism, is in reality a Spiritual world seen very partially and imperfectly, The only real world is the Spiritual world...The truth is that not matter, not any Force, not any physical thing, but Mind, personality, is the central fact of the Universe."

J.B.S. Haldane

 

 

"The nearest approach we have thus far made to the Ultimate, in our analysis of Matter and of Energy, indicate that the universal Reality is Mind."

Kirtley F. Mather

 

 

"Modern physics has eliminated the notion of substance...Mind is the First and most direct thing in our experience. I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness.., .The old atheism is gone.,. Religion belongs to the realm of Spirit and Mind, and cannot be shaken. "

Sir Arthur S. Eddington

 

 

"Science advances by providing a succession of approximations to the truth, each more accurate than the last, but each capable of endless degrees of higher accuracy."

Sir James Jeans

 

 

"Most of the best scientists now admit that there is more to their discoveries than observation and experiment by the process of reason, deduction, discursiveness. The scientific method that is enlightened has a third partner, and you may call it 'imaginative double vision,' insight, or what you please. It was there all along in Pasteur, in Newton, and other great scientists; but science was too pragmatic, too greatly concerned with 'practicality' and 'hard-headedness' to admit the Fact of God. As history demonstrates that science is of no avail until it becomes moral science. Until the fact has been sublimated, or related to the principle or law to which it belongs. This new type of scientific observation will beget a new type of research, and this new kind of whole-making research will usher in the good society, the Kingdom of God on earth."

Newton Dillaway

Consent

The Montrose Press

 

 

"Yes, science and spirituality are meeting. And their meeting house might well be named Compassion."

Matt Fox

 

 

"Every advance in science leaves morality in its ancient balance and it depends still on the inscrutable soul of man whether any discovery is mainly a benefit or mainly a calamity."

G.K. Chesterton

 

 

"I'm glad my wife doesn't know any science-My first wife did."

Einstein

(There is now evidence that Einstein got the genesis of his theories from the first wife)* Ed.

 

 

"You seem to think that I look back upon my life's work with serene satisfaction...Viewed more closely, however, things are not so bright. There is not an idea of which I can he certain. I am not even sure that I am on the right road."

Einstein

 

 

Many of the men who have contributed to the great changes in science have really been very unhappy over what they have been forced to do."

J. Robert Oppenheimer

 

 

 

"One of the great beauties of the scientific occupation is the pride of being a private in the great army of differentiators- the generals of which are never dead to their followers. Every Objective gained, every trench dug, every citadel conquered, is a permanent advance in organizing the new territory for the coming of the next integrator. Some day he may arrive and Make a dead complex live. He may be the son of an English lord, or a Czechoslovakian, an American broker. Thus is science the great democratic adventure. But when he comes, he will be hailed as King."

Hans Zinnsser

Rats, Lice, and History

 

"We trusted that science could and would tell us everything worth knowing and everything we need for guidance in our life, but science has delivered us to destruction by reducing man to an ‘electron-proton complex,’ to a ‘combination of physico-chemical elements,’ to ‘an animal closely related to the ape or monkey,’ to a ‘reflex mechanism’ or ‘a variety of stimulus-response relationship,’ to a special adjustment mechanism,’ to ‘psychoanalytical libido.’ Some indeed go so far as to deprive man even of mind, or thought, or consciousness…reducing him to a purely behavioristic  mechanism of unconditioned and conditioned reflexes."

P.A. Sorokin

The Crisis of Our Age (1941)

 

 

"Who knows whether science is reality, whether man-made criteria can be ‘objective’, whether the artificial worlds to which man has given the designation ‘sciences’ are any truer than dreams, visions or inspirations."

Ivar Lissner

Man, God and Magic

 

"The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies, not of achievements."

Ayn Rand

 

"In science the important thing is to modify and change one's idea as science advances."

-Claude Bernard

 

"Unpredictability in every field is the result of the conquest of the whole world by scientific power. This invasion by active knowledge tends to transform man’s environment and man himself – to what extent, with what risks, what deviations from the basic conditions of existence and in the preservation of life we simply do not know. Life has become, in short, the object of an experiment of which we can say only one thing – that it tends to estrange us more and more from what we were, or what we think we are, and that it is leading us…we do not know and can by no means imagine where."

Paul Valery (194)

Unpredictability

 

"It is a profound and necessary Truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them."

Robert Oppenheimer

 

"As opposed to its immediate predecessor, late twentieth-century science has given up all philosophical pretensions and has become a powerful business that shapes the mentality of its practitioners. The most glorious achievements of the past are used not as instruments of enlightenment but as a means of intimidation…Let somebody make a great step forward – and the profession is bound to turn it into a club for beating people into submission."

Paul Feyerbend

 

"…As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment – the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary. Of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, rarely in the Twentieth Century have as many as one percent had any significant background in science. The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson."

Carl Sagan

The Demon-Haunted World

 

"We need due process institutions for airing technical controversies."

Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz

(Member the National Academy of Sciences)

originator of proposal for "Due Process fact Forum

 

"The world of science, he well knew, was as tradition-bound and blinkered as any other when I it came to what was truly new and unorthodox. If you had a viewpoint that ran flat contrary to conventional wisdom, you were a flake, a crackpot, a crank. Or you were peddling ‘science fiction.’"

Ed Regis

Nano

 

   "It is astonishing that in the current era, routinely known as the Information Age, fallacious history is being taught on a massive scale. The modern world prides itself upon its reliance on truth in science. In other words, the "facts" alone are supposedly the determinant. According to modern thinking anything which can be proven scientifically should be adopted, while, if it is unscientific, if it can't be verified, it should be discarded. Ironically despite this philosophy the information regarding the origin of modern science within the standard textbooks, the ones read by school children and college students every year, is grossly inaccurate. This is inexcusable, in fact, it is hypocritical."

Dr. Kasem Khaleel

The Arabian Connection

 

 

"Investigation, accumulation of positive knowledge, minute methods of science, and prolonged observation were alien to Greek temperament. These were introduced to Europe by the Arabs. European science owes its existence to the Arabs."

Briffault

Making of Humanity

 

 

"The white-coated technocrat-scientist of today bears little resemblance to his intellectual ancestors, men like Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, T.H. Huxley, Darwin, and Einstein. Those giants had a sense of unity, an independence of spirit, a masterful cast of character, a certainty and dedication to values in relation to facts, and a tradition of personal autonomy with the concomitant sense of personal responsibility for their own actions. They would treat with scathing contempt those scientists who today shuffle off their responsibilities for the consequences of their scientific work with the excuses we so commonly hear ‘I can’t predict the social effects of my work; that is not within the scope of my obligation;’ or, ‘I provide only the information, not knowledge and techniques; others are responsible for their application;’ or, the most serious and pathetic of all, ‘If I don’t do it, someone else will.’ Such excuses define the tragedy of our time: the fragmentation, the atomization, of science, and the responsibility of its technological offspring."

Ruth Nanda Anshen

Biography of an Idea

 

"Belligerent science clues the opposition with a heavy, rigid view of science that alienates rather than persuades. Belligerent science seeks to win points in a debate, rather than win over the audience. Instead of appealing to the finer instincts of the lay audience by presenting itself as the defender of enlightened reason and sound experiment, it comes off as a new Spanish Inquisition. Belligerent science is science with a chip on its shoulder…"

Michio Kaku

Hyperspace

 

"Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated."

-George Santayana, the Life of Reason

 

"Science has nothing to do with common sense. Common sense is a set of prejudices. That's what we're fighting against."

-Robert Capps

Wired Magazine Sep 2010

 

 

"There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities."

E.J. Hobsbawm

 

 

"The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers independently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is cancelled out when the large picture is put together. This might conceivably be so if scientists were women and men from all sorts of different cultural and social backgrounds who came to science with very different ideologies and interests. But since, in fact, they have been predominantly university-trained white males from privileged social backgrounds, the bias has been narrow and the product often reveals more about the investigator than about the subject being researched.

Ruth Hubbard

Women Look at Biology Looking at Women

 

"…In many of the great scientific studies there seems to have been an additional mode of percipience that took up in the shadow zone where rationality ended, a further faculty that helped point the way to the particular revolutionary idea. The word Intuition is sometimes applied but, like a paper label on a bottle, only obscures what’s inside. Arthur Koestler in his intriguing book on the early Astronomers call it ‘sleep walking.’ Einstein spoke in his own case of the ‘gift of fantasy.’ As a young man of twenty-three, Isaac Newton suddenly glimpsed his law of gravity in little more time than an apple would take to fall from a tree. Alfred Russell Wallace came across natural selection with the same suddenness, supposedly during an attack of fever, after Darwin had labored over the problem for half a lifetime. Watson and Crick found the structure of DNA using tinker toys, youthful cockiness, and another lab’s x-ray photographs – photographs which until then had failed to be correctly interpreted. In each of these entries upon the ineffable, something more was at work than mere cerebration."

David Quammen

Natural Acts

 

"The history of science is not restricted to the enumeration of successful investigation. It has to tell of unsuccessful inquiries, and to explain why some of the ablest men have failed to find the key of knowledge, and how the reputation of others has only given a firmer footing to the errors into which they fell."

James Clerk Maxwell

 

   "How can the history of science be taught as it is today when the most respected scientific historians of the world propound the opposite? How can the editors of World Book Encyclopedia leave, with good conscience, a total void in their "Red Letter Dates In Science" from 650 to 1500 A.D., the era of Islamic science? In fact, this encyclopedia lists only two Red Letter Dates from 100 to 1500 A.D.; Galen's anatomy and physiology in the former date and Leonardo da Vinci's use of the experimental method in the later. It is well known that the Romans, including Galen, failed to produce significant contributions in the experimental sciences during their reign. However, contributions during the Islamic period were enormous, a fact which is indelibly recorded in the historical record.

  In the Western world fallacious information has been taught regarding the origins of the sciences for over 200 years. It is time that this is changed."

Dr. Kasem Khaleel

The Arabian Connection

 

"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."

George Washington

Address to Congress Jan 8, 1790

 

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?."

Ronald Reagan 1980

 

" Today the name and ways of Science have put on the garb of authority and become ‘scientism’; that the public has remained unenlightened by the superb achievements of science (it merely gapes at its wonders, incapable of critical judgment); and that the danger of an attack against science for its alleged sins against humanity is as possible in democratic countries as it has proved real in fascist. Science needs therefore to be criticized, taught and defended anew on its own impregnable grounds."

Jacques Barzun

 

"Our nineteenth-century training makes the questioner of any given scientists’ dictum seem an obscurantist, an enemy of science as such, when in fact the fundamental question modern man should put and try to answer is: What is science?"

Jacques Barzun

 

"Science as a Delphic oracle exists only in the popular imagination and the silent assumptions of certain scientists. At an given time there are only searchers who agree or disagree. The March of Science is not an orderly army on parade, but rather a land rush for the free spaces ahead. This means a degree of anarchy. Besides fogeism, faddism, love of stability, self-seeking, personal likes and dislikes, and all the other infirmities of mind, play as decisive a part in science as in any other cultural enterprise. This inevitable condition should neither be deployed nor hushed up. It is in fact what makes us admire the power of the methods which by creating conventions and testing them enable men to measure, plot and control events."

Jacques Barzun

Darwin, Marx, Wagner

 

"Messages from the unseen World

The Universe is the interior of the light-cone of the Creation.

Science is a Differential Equation.

Religion is a Boundary Condition."

Alan Turing

 

"Scientists do not discover in order to know, they know in order to discover. That inversion of purpose is more than just a trait, it is the essence of the matter. Humanists are the shamans of the intellectual tribe, wise men who interpret knowledge and transmit the folklore, rituals, and sacred texts. Scientists are the scouts and hunters. No one rewards a scientist for what he knows. Nobel Prizes and other trophies are bestowed for the new facts and theories he brings home to the tribe. One great discovery and the scientist himself is great forever, no matter how foolish the rest of his deeds and pronouncements. No discovery, and he will probably be forgotten, even if he is learned and wise in matters scientific. The humanist grows in stature as he grows in wisdom. He can gain immortality as a critic, and justly so. But this vocational opportunity is not open-not yet- to the scientist. The most memorable critics among scientists are those who served as foils for the great discoverers, helping them to clear error from the path.

   Scientists therefore spend their productive lives struggling to reach the edge of knowledge in order to make discoveries. The scientist is not a very romantic figure. Each day he goes into the laboratory or field energized by the hope of a great score. He is brother to the prospector and treasure hunter. Every little discovery is like a gold coin on the ocean floor. The professional's real business, the bone and muscle of the scientific endeavors amounts to a sort of puttering: trying to find a good problem, thinking up experiments, mulling over data, arguing in the corridor with colleagues, and making guesses with the aid of coffee and chewed pencils until finally something-usually small-is uncovered. Then comes a flurry of letters and telephone calls, followed by the writing of a short paper in an acceptable jargon. The great majority of scientists are hard-working, pleasant journeymen, not excessively bright, making their way through a congenial occupation."

Edwin O. Wilson

 

"In time to come it will often be difficult perhaps, to decide whether an advance in knowledge represents a step forward in physics, information theory or philosophy, where physics is expanding into biology or is employing physical methods and approaches to an even greater extent."

Werner Heisenberg

The End of Physics?

 

"They (scientists) tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheel-barrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work."

William Burroughs

The Adding Machine

 

"The man of science is a poor philosopher."

Albert Einstein

Out of my Later Years

 

"Upward of 90% of all Americans say they believe in God. But I bet a lot more than one of 10 also believe that science has got it basically right. This is the sadness of our secular lives. No one wants to live in a pointless, chaotic cosmos, but this is the one that science has given us, and that our culture has largely championed."

Mary Kaplan

Maybe Reason Isn’t Enough N.Y.Times

 

"…disciples tend to be more fanatical than their masters; they have committed themselves to his system, invested years of labor and staked their reputation on it; they fought the opposition and cannot tolerate the idea that the system might be at fault. To our-Herod. Herod is a phenomenon as common amongst scientists devoted to their theory as it is amongst politicians or theologians devoted to a doctrine – whether Freudian or Jungian, Stalinist or Trotskyist, Jesuit or Jansenite."

Arthur Koestler

The Case of the Midwife Toad

 

"Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the science of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries."

Vannevar Bush

Science Is Not Enough

 

"Science in the modern world has many uses. Its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich."

G.K.Chesterton

Celts and Celtophiles

 

 

 

"Facts themselves are not the ‘hard’ or ‘cold’ items to which we constantly appeal in order to silence our opponents."

Jacques Barzun

 

"Science has expelled God from Nature, and Nature in ceasing to be divine, ceases to be human."

John Dewey

(Commencement address at Smith College –1890)

 

"Science is neither a method nor a body of knowledge. It is a body of changing, learned opinion, aspiring to be true. These are certain facts about nature and history; and  our gasp of those facts is constantly changing."

George Santayana

 

"Let us look more closely; what is the scientific man? To begin with, a type of man that is not noble, with the virtues of a type of man that is not noble, which is to say, a type that does not dominate and is neither authoritative nor self-sufficient: he has industriousness, patient acceptance of his place in rank and file, evenness and moderation in his abilities and needs, an instinct for his equals and for what they need; for example, that bit of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet work, that claim to honor and recognition (which first of all presupposes literal recognition and recognizability), that utility which is needed to overcome again and again the internal mistrust which is the sediment in the hearts of all dependent men and herd animals."

Nietzche

Beyond Good & Evil

 

 

"The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced – by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix."

Erich Fromm

The Sane Society

 

"Science has ‘explained’ nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."

Aldous Huxley

 

"When we say ‘science’ we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect, or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science, the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priest craft into a great religious and political weapon."

Windham Lewis

The Art of Being Ruled

 

"Science is a cemetery of dead ideas."

Miguel De Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life

 

"To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live."

Ruth Hubbard

Women Look at Biology Looking at Women

 

Book: "The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science" by Theodore Roszak

 

"Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof."

John Kenneth Galbraith

 

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

Carl Sagan

The Demon-Haunted World-Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House)

 

"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.

Max Planck

 

 

"Even now in the enthusiasm for new discoveries, reported public interviews with scientists tend to run increasingly toward a future replete with ;more inventions, stores of energy, babies in bottles, deadlier weapons. Relatively few have spoken of values, ethics, art, religion – all those intangible aspects of life which set the tone of a civilization and determine, in the end, whether it will be cruel or humane; whether, in other words, the modern world, so far as its interior spiritual life is concerned, will be stainless steel like its exterior, or display the rich fabric of genuine human experience. The very indifference of many scientists to such matter reveals how far man has already gone toward the world of the ‘outside,’ of no memory, of contempt toward all that makes up the human tradition.

Loren Eisely

 

"Keep your early enthusiasm…but let it ever be regulated by rigorous examinations and tests. Never advance anything which cannot be proved in a simple and decisive fashion…Worship the spirit of criticism. If reduced to itself, it is not an awakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things, but without it, everything is fallible; it always has the lst word.

Louis Pasteur

 

The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that makes the man of genius in the scientific world.

Sir Henry Tizard

 

"Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived."

Edward O. Wilson

Consilience

 

"Over a half century ago philosopher Susanne Langer made the observation that we would do well to reconsider our unquestioned belief that modern science is a blessing to humanity. This was the middle of the twentieth century, the age of science coming into its own, with endless wonders and powers holding all in their thrall, like a new religion. Even as a casual aside, Langer's observation was as rank a heresy as possible in her day, as it probably would be in ours."

-Joseph Chilton Pearce

The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit

 

"If the term education may be understood in so large a sense as to include all that belongs to the improvement of the mind, either by the acquisition of the knowledge of others or by increase of it through its own exertions, we learn by them what is the kind of education science offers to man. It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing; not to despise the small beginnings, for they precede of necessity all great things in the knowledge of science, either pure or applied. It teaches a continual comparison of the small and great, and that under differences almost approaching the infinite: for the small as often contains the great in principle as the great does the small, and thus the mind becomes comprehensive. It teaches us to deduce principles carefully, to hold them firmly, or to suspend the judgment; to discover and obey law, and by it to be bold in applying to the greatest what we know of the smallest. It teaches us first by tutors and books to learn that which is already known to others, and then by the light and methods which belong to science to learn for ourselves and for others, so making a fruitful return to man in the future for that which we have obtained from the men of the past. Bacon, in his instruction, tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces. All this is true of the teaching afforded by any part of the physical science. Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful , but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity, or of any other force, is not that the power is mysterious and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under law, and that the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human mind is placed above, not beneath it, and it is in such a point of view that the mental education afforded by science is rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application, and utility, for, by enabling the mind to apply the natural power through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man."

Michael Faraday

(1850)

 

"Science, to put its warrant as concisely as possible, is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles."

Edward O. Wilson

 

"Science goes steadily about her work, revealing as she does it, the greatness of man, and if we misuse her, the blame is ours…All that we need are the firm standards and clear philosophy of life, which distinguishes evil from good, and chooses good and refuses evil…Any great new force that comes into the world is revolutionary; and for the moment upsets and confuses the minds of men. That was as true of Christianity as it is of science; it too was a disruptive force in the world…A history of the world might almost be written in terms, first of the discovery of great truths, and then of their exaggeration."

Sir Richard Livingstone

 

"Unfortunately, science, the prim, non-excitable child of the left brain, did not like women."

Shalain

The Alphabet vs The Goddess

 

"Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it."

Alan Valentie

 

"The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks."

-Albert Einstein

 

"The devils learned the language of the angels and humans can't tell the difference."

Jim Collins  (Bard of Woody Creek, Colorado)

 

"Anyone who works in science, knows the dull desperation and sharp anxiety of the early days in one's career. Few of us do not look back on those pinched, scraping times without a secret shudder, followed by a pang of relief that they are past. The miserable pay and financial woes; the long nights of study and the battles against sleep; the frightful hurdles of examinations; the climactic defense of one's doctoral dissertation; the hissing, malignant envy that is the curse of university life at all times and in all places; the constant struggle to get published, to win tenure, to carve out a niche and be recognized in one's field-all these torments are well known in Academe, and have been known to drive some people mad, even to suicide."

-William Maples

 

 

"We call things we don’t understand complex, but that means we haven’t found a good way of thinking about them."

TsuTomu Shimomura

Take Down

 

"What is our scientific civilization? Nothing? No, it is a very impressive something, but this something is really not what we thought it was…Once upon a time there was magic. Civilization learned to reproduce, reduce to a formula, and duplicate a part of this magic. That is our world of science. The rest of the magic has been tossed on the junk heap. We are now scratching around trying to piece it together again."

Arthur M. Young

` The Bell Notes

 

    "The effect of Greek dramatic literature was many-sided so far as concerns the various ways in which it indirectly affected medieval thought. The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imaginations as it exists today are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought. The absorbing interest in the particular heroic incidents, as an example and a verification of the workings of fate, reappears in our epoch as concentration of interest on the crucial experiments. It was my good fortune to be present at the meeting of the Royal Society in London when the astronomer Royal for England announced that the photographic plates of the famous eclipse, as measured by his colleagues in Greenwich Observatory, had verified the prediction of Einstein that rays of light are bent as they pass in the neighborhood of the sun. The whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the Greek drama: we were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the very staging:-the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific  generalizations was now, after more than two centuries to receive its first modification. Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great adventure in thought had at length come safe to shore."

-Alfred North Whitehead

Science and the Modern World

 

 

 

"If there is any mystery to relativity at all it lies in the question, Why has it become so mysterious?"

Joseph Schwartz

The Creative Mind

 

 

"Man himself, inasmuch as he makes use of his healthy senses, is the greatest and most exact physical apparatus; and that is just the greatest evil of modern physics – that one has, as it were, detached the experiment from man and wishes to gain knowledge of nature merely through that which artificial instruments show."

Goethe

 

"If science tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or profess to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water, it is all wrong."

Samuel Butler

 

"Science has promised us truth…It never promised us either peace or happiness."

Le Bon

 

".....science has been affected by a point of view which tries to be value-free. This is of course mere prejudice."

-David Bohm

 

"It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power. We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not...."

-Carl Sagan

 

"The scientific view of the world, and the method of abstraction by which it is arrived at, is an autonomous and authentic manner of dealing with what is real in the world in which we live; it is not an instrument of merely practical utility, nor on the other hand a philosophy, much less the only true philosophy. It is not an art, it is not a religion, it is not history, it is not philosophy; it is something different from all these, a special department and activity of the human spirit."

Needham

 

"Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics."

J.B.S. Haldane

 

"True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant."

Miguel De Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life

 

 

The fourth dimension had become almost a household word by 1910....Ranging from an ideal Platonic or Kantian reality-or even Heaven-the answer to all of the problems puzzling contemporary science, the fourth dimension could be all things to all people."

-Linda Dalrymple Henderson

 

"The game of science never stops, you see, for new problems arise whenever old problems are solved; but who would want it any other way? To solve everything would stop the game, and nothing else that life could offer would, in my opinion, make up for the intellectual chess."

Issac Asimov

Atom

 

"The Einstein legend, the myth of the incomprehensibility of relativity, has become archetypal in our culture. The clarity, simplicity, and beauty of relativity have been turned into their opposites with Einstein’s name becoming a synonym for the impossible to understand."

Joseph Scwartz

The Creative Moment

 

"I have come to have very profound and deep-rooted doubts whether Science, as practiced at present by the human race, will ever do anything to make the world a better and happier place to live in, or will ever stop contributing to our general misery."

Hendrik Willem van Loon

 

   "In the dim, dark past-for example in the late nineteenth century-being observant in science typically meant watching carefully for anomalies that might open new windows on nature. One such opening occurred when Willhelm Roentgen was observant and serendipitously discovered X-rays in 1895. It turns out that one A.W. Goodspeed of Philadelphia had inadvertently made an X-ray photograph five years earlier (February 1890) , but had not recognized its significance. He was insufficiently observant and held back the progress of science for some five years. That is about the same period it took establishment science to recognize the Wright brothers' flight of December 17,1903, even though they had operated their flyer for five years thereafter in full public view.

   It is a new day. Official science is at war with anomalies that threaten its foundations. Led by its most egregiously self-satisfied and arrogant branch, Official Physics, its micro-minded buffoonish commentators have a scorched Earth policy for all that is truly new. Let any anomaly, such as cold fusion, challenge its sacred Texts, and it is open season on its discoverers and observers. Science is dead. Scientism reigns."

Eugene F. Mallove. Sc.D.

Infinite Energy Issue 42,2002

 

"What Science Does Not Study. I noted above that modern science has concentrated on empowerment and not wisdom. It might fairly be asked, what sort of wisdom is science ignoring? I would answer that human power is often won at the expense of nature, and therefore that mere empowerment is barbaric and self-endangering. No scientific project is creditable unless it involves serious attention to environmental consequences, and no science student illiterate in the environment should receive a university degree. The programmatic incorporation of environmentalism into scientific education would not only civilize science; it would also enrich, temper and professionalize the environmental movement. Why should I call this wisdom? Because, as we learn from teachers like Aldo Leopold, environmentalism is grounded in the contemplation of nature's wisdom. Of the many questions that science asks nature, one that should be heard more often is "How can we live in greater harmony with you?"

Robert Grudin

On Dialogue

 

"Its once feeble vanguards often trampled down, often perishing in isolation, have now become a vast organized army marching forward on all fronts towards objectives that none may measure or define. It is an army that cares nothing for all the laws that men have made, nothing for their most time-honored customs, nothing for their most dearly cherished beliefs, nothing for their deepest instincts."

-Winston Churchill   1932

 

"In A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science, published in 1992, historian David F. Noble makes a persuasive argument that today's masculine culture of science and technology evolved in the late medieval period, when access to higher learning was monopolized by celibate, ascetic, and frequently misogynistic priests. Such virtual eunuchs were repelled and terrified by women's biology-a horror they shared with the space-program engineers banished menstruating women from the lab.

   During the late nineteenth century, male anxiety about females in the workplace often took the form of paternalistic health concerns. In Sex in Education, published in 1873, Harvard physician Edward H. Clark argued that women's frail constitutions, and especially their fertility, would be destroyed by the strain of higher education. Yet other male scientists didn't even bother to cloak their fear of women. In 1880, for instance, two distinguished male chemists, Henry Morton, the president of Stevens Institute of Technology, and Thomas Sperry Hunt, a professor at MIT and fellow of the Royal Society, threw their colleagues a festive male-only gathering, which they christened the "Misogynist Dinner of the American Chemical Society." Not only ware women excluded, the entertainment consisted of skits demeaning them. One recitation, titled "The Temptation of Saint Anthony,:" explicitly linked "the brave new men of science" with their "monastic heritage," Noble points out. "There are many devils that walk this world, " the poem began. But "a laughing woman with two bright eyes is the Worst Devil of All."

-M.G. Lord

Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science

 

   "One more roadblock deserves mention, and while it might seem esoteric, it's really important: it's what we call tunnel vision among scientists and other professionals. in our complex society, science has become segmented into narrow specialties, a trend identified more than a decade ago by Peter Galison, a Harvard philosophy of science professor. In his book Image and Logic (University of Chicago press. 1997), Galison noted that each area of science has its own language and set of symbols. Even scientists in areas that are closely related-organic and nonorganic chemistry, for instance-have problems sharing their findings. The problems are compounded many times when it comes, say to chemists talking to biologists."

Stephen Leeb, PhD

Game Over

 

 

"So the second scientific revolution has abandoned the hidden tenets of the first. its model of nature no longer assumes that she must be causal, continuous, and independent. These assumptions were idealized from everyday experience, and they were right, and splendidly successful, during two centuries when physics worked and measured on the everyday scale. They have turned out to be false on the small scale of the atom and on the large scale of the nebulas, and at least inappropriate to studies of the living."

-Bronowski

A Science of the Future

 

"Science feels and acts like a kind of religion, a lot of the time. Everything is similar if you're willing to look that far out of focus. I'd watch that. Then you'll find that black is white. Look for differences! You're looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot."

-Marvin Minsky

 

"The longer students are exposed to K-12 education system, the worse they do-particularly in the critical areas of math and science."

-Norman Augustine   (former Chair of the National Academics, the U.S.'s official science advisory organization)

 

   "The impact of military secrecy on science has been profound, affecting nearly every branch of knowledge. An interesting case concerns the seafloor stripes discovered during World War II. These large, linear, magnetic anomalies are caused by a combination of seafloor spreading and periodic reversals in the Earth's magnetic field. They were also useful in locating enemy German (and later Russian) submarines, assisting in the scanning for underwater metallic objects. Seafloor stripes were important in the acceptance of continental drift, but their locations and even their existence were classified until the 1950s. Had these been openly available to the scientific community, the theory of continental drift could have been accepted years before it was. Secrecy in this instance produced ignorance in the form of delayed knowledge.

   There are other examples of military agnogenesis. Military-sponsored research in the 1940s led to early predictions of global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps; the guardians of military secrecy kept this quiet, however, and the topic was not widely and openly discussed. Climate science has suffered new kinds of agnotology in recent years, as Bush administration strategists have tried to keep the question of anthropogenic global warming "open." As with tobacco industry apologetics, calls for "more research" on climate change have served as an effective stalling tactic: the strong evidence of warming is denied, using the pretence of a quest for rigor as a trick to delay action. Calls for precision can play out as prevarication."

-Robert N. Proctor

Agnotology: The making & Unmaking of Ignorance

 

"you have to remember that these supposedly evil scientists are actually just guys with families and dreams."

-Daniel Wilson

 

"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike-and yet it is the most precious thing we have."

-Albert Einstein

 

  "Why, then, does science work? The answer is that nobody knows. it is a complete mystery-perhaps the complete mystery- why the human mind should be able to understand anything at all about the wider universe."

-Timothy Ferris

Coming of Age in the Milky Way

 

 

"The hallmark of modern science is that it has outrun common sense, and in so doing it has run headlong into our metaphorical, poetic self, the same part of ours elf which mythologizes. Science in our time has come to myth, and myth has come to life.

   science and myth, like lion and lamb, may one day lie together in peace. Then we shall find ourselves free of the terrible historic necessity of having to mythologize the unity of the universe."

Larry Dossey, M.D.

Space, Time & Medicine

 

Find 4,000 years of women in science, starting with EnHedu’Anna, a priestess of the moon goddess (circa 2354 B.C.) at www.astr.ua.educ/4000WS/WS.html-with links

 

"All scientific work is incomplete-whether it be observational or experimental. all scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone action that it appears to demand at a given time.

   Who knows, asked Robert Browning, but the world may end tonight? True, but on available evidence most of us make ready to commute on the 8:30 next day."

-Sir Austin Bradford Hill   an address to the Royal Society of Medicine  1965

 

 

   "From time to time, people suggest to me that scientists ought to give more consideration to social problems-especially that they should be more responsible in considering the impact of science upon society. This same suggestion must be made to many other scientists, and it seems to be generally believed that if the scientists would only look at these very difficult social problems and not spend so much time fooling with the less vital scientific ones, great success would come of it.

   It seems to me that we do think about these problems from time to time, but we don't put full-time effort into them-the reason being that we know we don't have any magic formula for solving problems, that social problems are very much harder than scientific ones, and that we usually don't get anywhere when we do think about them."

   I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy-and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter. Since the question of the value of science is not a scientific subject, this discussion is dedicated to proving my point-by example.

   The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. it is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things. Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science, it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad-but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value-even though the power may be negated by what one does.."

-Richard P. Feynman PhD (Nobel Prize Winner)

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

 

 

 

"Attacks against science are likely to become more bitter and more widespread in the future, as long as the economic inequities in our society remain sharp and science continues to be predominantly engaged in building toys for the rich. To forestall such attacks, whether or not we feel guilt for the sins of society, the scientific community should invest heavily in projects that benefit all segments of our population...What is needed is a major commitment of scientific resources to the development of new technology that will bring our derelict cities and derelict children back to life. if our profession does not put its heart into such a commitment, then we shall deserve the passionate hatred that we shall sooner or later encounter."

-Freeman J. Dyson  "Science in Trouble",

Article: "Citizen Scientists" by Amy Dockser Marcus  The Wall Street Journal Dec 3-4,2011

Book: "Future Science" by Stephen Pinker

Book: "The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing" by Gregory Schrempp

"Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity," a 48-lecture course taught by David Christian available at the Teaching Company

The Fleeting World by David Christian

                 ************************

Book: "Science Says" by W.H. Freeman

Book: "Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything" by Margaret Wertheim

Book: "Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion" by Steven Gimbel

Book: "National Geographic Concise History of Science & Invention: An illustrated Time Line

Book: "The Jewel House; Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution" by Deborah E. Harkness

Book: "Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began" by Jack Repcheck

Book: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn

Book: "The Archimedes Codex; How A Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist" by Reviel Netz and William Noel

Book: "The Varieties Of Scientific Experience" by Carl Sagan

Book: "The Impact of Science on Society" by Bertrand Russell

Book: "Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema" by Christopher Frayling

Book: "Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations" ed by W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter

Book: "Knowledge is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision inspired Francis Bacon to create Modern Science" by John Henry

Book: "The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of the Greatest Inventors" by John Gribbin

Book: "Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science" by Amir D. Aczel

Book: "Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science-from Babylonians to the Maya" by Dick Teresi

Book: "Knowledge Is  Power" by John Henry

Book: "Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science" by Robert Lomas

Book: "The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution" by Deborah E. Harkness

Book: "Eureka!: The Birth of Science" by Andrew Gregory

Book: "Science Says: A Collection of Quotations on the History, Meaning, and Practice of Science" Ed. by Rob Kaplan

Book: "The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science" by Robert P. Crease

Book: "The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power" Ed. by P. Gallison & D.J. Stump

Book: "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram

Book: "Magic Universe: The Oxford Guide to Modern Science" by Nigel Calder

Book: "The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science" by ed John L. Heilbron

Book: "Science in the Looking Glass: What do Scientists Really know?" by E. Brian Davies

Book: "Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science" by Michael Nielsen

Book: "Discoveries: Great breakthroughs in 20th Century Science" by Alan Lightman

Book: "Engaging Science: How to Understand its Practices Philosophically" by Joseph Rouse

Book: "A Concise History of Science in India" by D.M. Bose (ed)

Book: "Science and Civilization in China" by Needham

Book: "Science and Civilization in Islam" by Nasr

Book: "Science Across Cultures: An Annotated Bibliography of Books on Non-Western Science, Technology, and Medicine" by Helaine Selin

Book: "Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures" by Helaine Selin

Book: "The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World" by Jenny Uglow

Book: "The Seven Greatest Scientific Discoveries in History and the People Who Made Them" by David Eliot Brody & Arnold R. Brody, Ph.D.

Book: "Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great ideas of Science" by Peter Atkins

Book: "Galileo's Daughter" by Dava Sobel

Book: "Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of A Scientific Speculation" by Joao Magueljo

Book: "The Science Book: " Ed. by Peter Tallack

Book: "The End of Science" by John Horgan

Book: "Religion and Science" by Bertrand Russell

Book: "Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics" by Edward Teller

Book: The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything." by K.C. Cole

Book: "Feminism and Science" ed. Evelyn Fox Keller

Book: "Hypatia's Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century" by Margaret Alic

Book: "The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science" by Theodore Roszak

Book: "A Brief History of Science: As Seen Through the Development of Scientific Instruments" by Thomas Crump

Book: "The Splendid Feast Of Reason" by S. Jonathan Singer

Book: "Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes" by Richard Watson

Book: The Age of Science: What Scientists Learned in the 20th Century." by Gerard Piel

Book: "Faith, Science and Understanding" by John Polinghorne

"The Quotable Scientist" by Leslie Alan Horvitz

"Speaking of Science"

Book: "Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science" by Steve Fuller

Book: "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics" by George Johnson

Book: "Forbidden Science" by Richard Milton

Book: "The Hidden Face of God." .by Gerald L. Schroeder

Book: "Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion" by Steven Gimbel

Book: "Chasing Science: Science as Spectator Sport" by Frederik Pohl

Book: "Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality At the New Frontiers of Life" by Lee M. Silver

Book: "False Prophets: Fraud and Error in Science and Medicine" by Alexander Kohn

Book: "The Infamous Boundary: Seven Decades of Heresy in Quantum Physics" by David Wick

Book: "The Tests of Time: Readings in the Development of Physical Theory" by Lisa M. Dolling, arthur F. Gianelli & Glenn N. Statile, eds

Book: "Science on the Web: A Connoisseur's Guide to Over 500 of the Best, Most Useful, and Most Fun Science Websites" by Edward J. Renehan, Jr.

Book: "The Scientific 100: A Ranking of the most influential scientists, past and Present" by John Simmons

Book: "In The Name Of Science: A History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human Experimentation" by Andrew Goliszek

Book: "The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty" by Walter Gratzer

Book: "Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World" by Eugenie Samuel Reich

Book: "Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science" by Peter Pesic

Book: "The Biographical Dictionary Of Scientists, Third Edition" Ed. by R. Porter & M. Ogilvie

See Article: "Scientists Fete China's Supreme Polymath by Richard Stone  Science Vol 318 2 Nov 2007

 

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