Thomas Aquinas Quotes

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

In science it is not enough to think of an important problem on which to work. It is also necessary to know the means which could be used to investigate the problem.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of themanly contemplation of the whole.

All problems are finally scientific problems.

A real scientist solves problems, not wails that they are unsolvable.

Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.

It seems to me that there is a good deal of ballyhoo about scientific method. I venture to think that the people who talk most about it are the people who do least about it. Scientific method is what working scientists do, not what other people or even they themselves may say about it. No working scientist, when he plans an experiment in the laboratory, asks himself whether he is being properly scientific, nor is he interested in whatever method he may be using as method.

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.

The aim of natural science is not simply to accept the statements of others, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

I'm first and foremost a scientist.

I am completely obsessed with numbers and data. I have become a scientist in later life.

What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

Reason and science allow us to properly think about the necessary data that are required in order to answer a given question. This is precisely why the scientific method is the most powerful framework for understanding the world.

Indeed, the most important part of engineering work-and also of other scientific work-is the determination of the method of attacking the problem, whatever it may be, whether an experimental investigation, or a theoretical calculation. ... It is by the choice of a suitable method of attack, that intricate problems are reduced to simple phenomena, and then easily solved.

When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton ... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

Science is methodology. As a belief system it's disastrous.

The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

Those who do good science do so because they choose problems that are suited to them.

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.