Scientific Boundaries Quotes

Science is busy with the hither-end of things, not the thither-end.

Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America.

You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.

And what is impossible to science?

There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.

Precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt , it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt . It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.

Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws,' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.