Philosophy Of Science Quotes

“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
― Richard Feynman

“A theory that explains everything, explains nothing”
― Karl Popper

“It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed."
"That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
[Correspondance to Robert Thorton in 1944]”
― Albert Einstein

“Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“But we must not forget that all things in the world are connected with one another and depend on one another, and that we ourselves and all our thoughts are also a part of nature. It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of the change of things; made because we are not restricted to any one definite measure, all being interconnected. A motion is termed uniform in which equal increments of space described correspond to equal increments of space described by some motion with which we form a comparison, as the rotation of the earth. A motion may, with respect to another motion, be uniform. But the question whether a motion is in itself uniform, is senseless. With just as little justice, also, may we speak of an “absolute time” --- of a time independent of change. This absolute time can be measured by comparison with no motion; it has therefore neither a practical nor a scientific value; and no one is justified in saying that he knows aught about it. It is an idle metaphysical conception.”
― Ernst Mach, Science of Mechanics

“Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.”
― Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method

“An anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice and so on).”
― Paul Feyerabend, Against Method

“In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“Love is a chemical reaction,
But it cannot be fully understood or defined by science.
And though a body cannot exist without a soul,
It too cannot be fully understood or defined by science.
Love is the most powerful form of energy,
But science cannot decipher its elements.
Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love,
But even the most advanced physician
Cannot prescribe it as medicine.


INCOMPLETE SCIENCE by Suzy Kassem”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“We make versions, and true versions make worlds.”
― Nelson Goodman

“Physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“In those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced -- all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological circumstances, simply copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”
― Bertrand Russell

“On the way, I shared the backseat of Feyerabend's little sports car with the inflatable raft he kept there in case an 8-point earthquake came while he was on the Bay Bridge.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“Kant said, there is Das Ding an sich, a thing as it is, and there is Das Ding für uns, a thing as we know it.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Fredkin [...] praat over een interessant kenmerk van computerprogramma's, waaronder cellulaire automaten: er is geen kortere route mogelijk naar wat de uitkomst wordt. Dit is het wezenlijke verschil tussen de 'analytische' benadering van de traditionele wiskunde, inclusief differentiële vergelijkingen, en de 'computer'-benadering met algoritmes. Je kunt een toekomstige toestand van een systeem voorspellen zonder alle tussenstappen te kennen als je de analytische methode gebruikt. Maar bij cellulaire automaten moet je alle tussenstappen doorrekenen om te weten hoe de uitkomst zal zijn: je kunt de toekomst niet voorspellen, behalve door de toekomst af te wachten. [...] Fredkin legt uit: 'je kunt het antwoord op een vraag niet sneller kennen dan wanneer je volgt wat er gebeurt.' [...] Fredkin gelooft dat het universum letterlijk een computer is en dat het gebruikt wordt door iets of iemand om een probleem op te lossen. Het klinkt als een grap met goed en slecht nieuws: het goede nieuws is dat onze levens een doel hebben; het slechte nieuws is dat onze levens het doel zijn van een of andere hacker ver weg die pi wil uitrekenen met een oneindig groot getal achter de komma.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“We all live our lives blindly believing in the people who make the decisions. Believing in science. Because the world is inscrutable and all information is hazy. We accept the existence of a round globe, of an atom's nucleus that sticks together like drops, of a shrinking universe -- and the necessity of interfering with genetic material. Not because we know these things are true, but because we believe the people who tell us so. we are all proselytes of science. And, in contrast to the followers of other religions, we can no longer bridge the gap between ourselves and the priests. Problems arise when we stumble on an outright lie. And it affects our own lives....that of a child who for the first time catches his parents in a lie he had always suspected.”
― Peter Hoeg

“n those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced -- all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological or political circumstances, simply copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“In those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced -- all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological or political circumstances, simply copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Extraordinary technology brings extraordinary recklessness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“It is not that a whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts themselves are redefined and re-created in the process of their interaction. So the reductionist sociobiologists argue that individual human limitations place constraints on society, but, in fact, social organization is the negation of individual limitations.”
― Richard Lewontin

“For progress there is no cure.”
― John von Neumann

“I kind of love it. It's so macabre. The reason we haven't seen or heard from anything off-world is that reaching off-world status is a civilisational death knell. Life either gets stuck there or destroyed there. It still doesn't really explain anything though - we can't see anyone because it's impossible to see anyone. It's circular. It doesn't say why becoming space proficient dooms us.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“Measure of truth is the good it does, truth without heart is bigotry supreme.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“Truth without heart is bigotry supreme.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“There is not one but two truths,
truth of facts and truth of good.
Truth of facts is worth the honor,
when it serves the truth of good.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“Pride of truth is the good it does.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“[...] The statement "Botticelli's Birth of Venus is stunning", for starters, is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, because there is no experiment that might show this statement to be false. Parallax method and equations conventionally determined that the average distance between the Earth and the Moon is 384 400 Km (238 855 miles). Now, if we were to conduct hands-on investigation for its validation or an audit to demonstrate its falsification, direct testing of such a distance measure would require a scientist to physically travel the space with a giant ruler to calculate the scale between the two points. [...] The problem that scientific certainty is a myth still struggles to brush past the academic prejudice of most scientists who are green on critical analysis for its alleged pedagogical irrelevance.”
― Vincent Bozzino, Philosophy Trips: A Naive's Guide