Scientific Thinking Quotes

Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

We're not too out there to educate people about any specific thing necessarily so much as we are to encourage critical and scientific thinking.

Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything - new ideas and established wisdom.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Science isn't just for scientists - it's not just a training for careers.

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

But now I've got a young son and his interest is in science and now when I talk to him, I see that in the science sphere of our lives there is new, there is progress.

I am very pro-science.

But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.

So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No," I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely." At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.

A good scientist goes beyond the data he has. He applies new concepts he hadn't applied before….On some things, I was not right, but ... you can propose these ideas and stimulate thinking

Scientific concepts sometimes elude the vast majority of elected officials.

At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.

If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him …

People have this idea that if you're not brilliant like Einstein, you can't be a scientist. And that's just a myth. He was the one out of a million scientists, but there were 999,999 other scientists who were not as brilliant but who just do great science, as well.

To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.

Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.

No scientist thinks in formulae.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

When I was a child, it was cool to be a scientist.

It's hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That's more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier.