Rupert Sheldrake Quotes

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

While it is quite reasonable for scientists to be skeptical of new ideas that do not fit within the accepted realm of scientific knowledge, the best science often emerges from situations where results carefully obtained do not fit within the accepted paradigms.

Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table.

I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things.

Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma if you're right. And if you're really lucky, you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation.

Don't underestimate the power of your vision to change the world. Whether that world is your office, your community, an industry or a global movement, you need to have a core belief that what you contribute can fundamentally change the paradigm or way of thinking about problems.

The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

And the continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have always been included as limiting cases in the new ones.

I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

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.

I love challenging the status quo.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

A lot of the things that until now seemed unthinkable are starting to be thinkable.

In any industry, the people with the freshest ideas usually come from outside.

New questions can produce new scientific leaps. They can tiddlywink new flips of insight and understanding. Big ones. Paradigm shifts.

There's always that argument to make - that you're in better company historically if people don't understand what you're doing.

Science is the first expression of punk, because it doesn't advance without challenging authority. It doesn't make progress without tearing down what was there before and building upon the structure.

There is some truth to the idea that, in the fields of science, individual contributions of great significance are possible.

We cannot have tomorrow’s miracles if we tie scientists’ hands with yesterday’s rules.

Changes do occur often with such suddenness in ways not foreseen except by isolated thinkers far removed from the consensus of their day.

Work of intellectual daring carries the danger of increased error, in both frequency and consequence.... Intrusive regulation by nonscientists is most frightening for this reason: innovation and chanciness will die.

Mainstream science starts as heresy.

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end in superstitions.

Individuals who break through by inventing a new paradigm are almost always...either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change....These are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.