Scientific Ideas Quotes

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.

The importance of religious faith, of social, economic, political, artistic, and scientific ideas in shaping the form of the world and the making of war and peace is not to be estimated as less than other basic forces.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

Taken over the centuries, scientific ideas have exerted a force on our civilization fully as great as the more tangible practical applications of scientific research.

I tell personal stories associated with aspects of the theory, and I hope they are interesting and compelling. I don't feel you're going to change a grownup's mind in one reading. People have to be exposed to scientific ideas over and over again for years. It's also not a textbook.

Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.

Science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth

I can see there's a connection between not following normal thinking and doing creative thinking. I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.

These disturbing phenomena [Extra Sensory Perception] seem to deny all our scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

In Europe I have been accused of taking my scientific ideas from the Church. In America I have been called a heretic, because I will not let my church-going friends pat me on the head.

People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.

My own ideas on the mechanism of catalytic phenomena were very different from those at one time commonly held, ideas which I no doubt owed to the influence of the illustrious teacher who had guided my first steps in chemistry nearly twenty years before - I refer, of course, to Berthelot.

A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.