Scientific Revolution Quotes

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.

I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

Pasteur will be celebrated almost as a God-like figure. This is when the moon completes her great cycle, but by other rumors, he shall be dishonored.

… science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization.

Galileo - the father of modern physics - indeed of modern science.

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

Science is not 'organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition.

It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin's insights not only changed his contemporaries' view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.

Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.

I've always been fascinated by real scientists - Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and so many others - how they've come up with solutions to very complicated problems that nobody else can seem to figure out.

Written in 1895, Alfred Nobel's will endowed prizes for scientific research in chemistry, physics, and medicine. At that time, these fields were narrowly defined, and researchers were often classically trained in only one discipline. In the late 19th century, knowledge of science was not a requisite for success in other walks of life.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

And yet it moves.

... science is the most revolutionary force in the world.

In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists.

Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….

Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in character and the most stupendous in the scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion.

Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer.