William Whewell Quotes

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.

One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.

I've been through a lot. I've thought a lot about life, and I've spent a lot of time studying history and science.

Scientists are really very conscious of the fact that they stand on the shoulders of an enormous tree of preceding workers and that their own contribution is not so enormous.

Epistemology has always been affected by technologies like the telescope and the microscope, things that have created a radical shift in how we sense physical reality.

Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe rather than practical applications for commercial gain. But their discoveries later turned out to have great practical benefits.

Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow's problems flow.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

From all this it follows what the general character of the problem of the development of a body of scientific knowledge is, in so far as it depends on elements internal to science itself.

If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.

I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way.

If you go back to the 17th century, scientists generally weren't rewarded much at all for sharing discoveries, and as a result, they conducted a lot of their research very, very secretively indeed.

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.

As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us - aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.

I suppose I'm worried that someday there will be some exciting experiments to do, and there won't be anyone around who knows what experiments are.

The empire of man over things is founded on the ... sciences.

Every science has been an outcast.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

I love science and that time in history when science and the humanities were the same thing.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

Research in the natural sciences operates in successive approximations. We are glad to be able to offer many good problems for research by generations to come.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.