Einstein’s relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king... its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.
Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought, as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that all the lessons are true... Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Fundamentalist Christians, adhering to what is termed 'creation science,' loudly promote the scientific accuracy of the Bible, but they sift or reinterpret science through the tiny mesh of their ideological filter. Not much real science gets through.
Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.
One of the most important aspects of science that I learned from my father was to distrust authority.
Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
I do not believe in God. I'm an atheist. I consider myself a critical thinker, and it fascinates me that in the 21st century most people still believe in, as George Carlin puts it, 'the invisible man living in the sky'
'The Skeptical Environmentalist' was much more the idea of the scientific argument of realizing that we need to be skeptical about a lot of these stories that we hear and to put them in context.
I'm a closeted nerd. I studied Richard Dawkins. I watched every lecture. He's sort of the leading scientific atheist of our time. He's very provocative. His whole thing is science over spirituality.
You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.
Religious thinkers have done their best to twist science and philosophy to back up their law.
Doubt is clearly a value in science. It is important to doubt and that the doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of great value.
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.
Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.
No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment. For this reason the discoverer of a new fact seldom feels quite so confident of it as others do.
I've always wanted to make the world a more rational place. I'm still working on it.
The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths.
I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as they do astrology, as a type of ancient superstition. According to my conviction this is, unjustified. The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the uncanny reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.
There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.
I'm wide open to evidence of the supernatural, but I also think that the majority of those experiences are probably natural phenomena we don't understand just yet.
