Scientific Clarity Quotes

Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science.

Textbook science is beautiful! Textbook science is comprehensible, unlike mere fascinating words that can never be truly beautiful. Elementary science textbooks describe simple theories, and simplicity is the core of scientific beauty. Fascinating words have no power, nor yet any meaning, without the math.

On climate change, the science is clearer about what you need to do to get a real impact than... on counterterrorism.

While many questions about quantum mechanics are still not fully resolved, there is no point in introducing needless mystification where in fact no problem exists. Yet a great deal of recent writing about quantum mechanics has done just that.

There are three kinds of explanation in science: explanations which throw a light upon, or give a hint at a matter; explanations which do not explain anything; and explanations which obscure everything.

As a scientist Miss [Rosalind] Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.

I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible, but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right.

One contribution scientists can and should make is to be clear and explicit about the limits of scientific understanding, a matter that is particularly important in societies where people are trained to defer to alleged experts.

Art is science made clear.

We find sects and parties in most branches of science; and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue. Sophistry has been more effectually excluded from mathematics and natural philosophy than from other sciences. In mathematics it had no place from the beginning; mathematicians having had the wisdom to define accurately the terms they use, and to lay down, as axioms, the first principles on which their reasoning is grounded. Accordingly, we find no parties among mathematicians, and hardly any disputes.

The diagnosis is clear, the science in unequivocal-it's completely immoral, even, to question now, on the basis of what we know, the reports that are out, to question the issue and to question whether we need to move forward at a much stronger pace as humankind to address the issues.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations.

The eloquence of a scientist is clarity; scientific truth is always more luminous when its beauty is unadorned than when it is tricked out in the embellishments with which our imagination would seek to clothe it.

Most of the papers which are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.