Scientific Expertise Quotes

If the West can claim superiority in anything, it is . . . in science and scientific technique.

I know how to do science. I know how to make things. I don't know how to run a company. Now that's a really tough job.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

Research in any domain of science today requires specialized training to build up knowledge and clinical competence. To make major breakthroughs, we need people with expertise who are engaged in sustained research over a long period of time - in a word, scientists.

Scientific concepts sometimes elude the vast majority of elected officials.

I used to say I represented 33% of the strategic reserve of physicists in Congress.

I am a particle physicist, which is the nearest branch to nuclear physics. So in that sense I was the sort of right connection with the subject of nuclear energy and so on.

Well, I have been trained my entire life to recognize these outbreaks and recognize viruses. I have a Ph.D. in virology.

All I'm doing, all I have done for 40 years, is spend time with the best scientific experts, gain their confidence, and take advantage of their patience in explaining things to me over and over again in progressively simpler language that I can understand, so that I can read it back to them and get their sign off, where they say, "Yep, that's it, Al. You've got it." When I understand it, I know I can explain it to other people. When the scientists' predictions end up being true, I see that as an opportunity to say to people, "Listen carefully to what they're saying now."

The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more inclined to try to derive an ought from an is, than the population at large.

I am not a scientist. I have never analyzed the far reaches of the solar system through the lens of a telescope nor scrutinized cancer cells under a microscope.

I used to watch the old 'Flash Gordon' series on TV, and it was thrilling to rocket to the planet Mongo every week. But after a while, I figured out that although Flash got the girl and all the accolades, it was really Dr. Zarkov who made the series work. Without Dr. Zarkov, there could be no Flash Gordon.

If you look at winners of the Nobel Prize in biology, you'll find a fair smattering of people who don't know how to work a pipette.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high attainments in their specialties-for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and Osler-men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard them stated.

Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right?

Almost half our representatives in Washington apparently know more about science than our scientists. Or they pretend to, because big corporations give them a lot of money to make sure they can keep doing the destructive things that they do.

Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world - possibly none - have a sufficiently thorough, 'big picture' understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem.

Whenever you involve scientists with politicians there is a struggle.

It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way?

We've established a Washington State Academy of Sciences that will enable us to make decisions based on science about what is right for our state, meaning the quality of our lives will get better.

Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so may separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.