Michael Faraday Quotes

The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognised, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.

There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.

When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.

Science is not ... a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.

Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge.

For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be: "We must know - we will know!"

Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

What is believed to be a fact is only a fact until another fact supersedes it. Science is only a fashion. Nothing more.

I have faith that science is a good thing. Seriously, I'd say that I am very much in awe of nature. In fact, I think to some extent, "awe" was a word that was almost invented for scientists.

The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

Cherish [Science], venerate her, follow her methods faithfully ... and the future of this people will be greater than the past.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.

Most man only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.

The present generation finds itself the heir of a vast patrimony of science; and it must needs concern us to know the steps by which these possessions were acquired, and the documents by which they are secured to us and our heirs for ever.

Those who draw their sustenance from science are blessed. It is for me to only derive an occasional pleasure. This is nothing worthy of conceit, but I am indeed touched by the joys. This book is an ode to such joys, a digest of my collections from various sources.

Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Although humans have existed on this planet for perhaps 2 million years, the rapid climb to modern civilization within the last 200 years was possible due to the fact that the growth of scientific knowledge is exponential; that is, its rate of expansion is proportional to how much is already known. The more we know, the faster we can know more. For example, we have amassed more knowledge since World War II than all the knowledge amassed in our 2-million-year evolution on this planet. In fact, the amount of knowledge that our scientists gain doubles approximately every 10 to 20 years.

Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.