Science

Douglas Adams - If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

Joshua Angrist - There is more failure than success in empirical work.

Sinan Aral - Revolutions in science have often been preceded by revolutions in measurement.

Samuel Arbesman - In fact, if you uttered the statement “Eighty percent of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today” nearly anytime in the past three hundred years, you’d be right.

Isaac Asimov (in Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright, 1978) - I believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Charles Babbage - The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data. 

Kaushik Basu - One thing that experts know, and that non-experts do not, is that they know less than non-experts think they do.

Luis Bettencourt - We tend to look at things by the way they look, by form, [but] all the successful theories of science are not about form at all – they’re about function. They’re about how things develop, how things change. They’re about process.

Sir James Black - I call it the principle of obliquity: goals are often best achieved without intending them.

Daniel J. Boorstin (1984) - The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge. 

Ronald Coase (1981) - If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.

After Ronald Coase (cf supra) - If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

Noam Chomsky - If you take a look at the progress of science, the sciences are kind of a continuum, but they're broken up into fields. The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say physics -- greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

Charles Darwin - False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Simon DeDeo - The 10 scariest words in the social sciences: "I'm from the physics department and I'm here to help."

Jared Diamond - It doesn’t appeal to me to argue with people I don’t respect.

Freeman Dyson - The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Albert Einstein - The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Albert Einstein - It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. . . . It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

Eric Falkenstein (2020) - Argument by authority is ubiquitous among scientists of all stripes, only today this tactic is masked by having multiple subtle assumptions justified by references to various well-cited peer-reviewed articles, each of which itself does the same thing, making it impossible to refute because no one has that much time.

Eric Falkenstein (2020) - Simple models are better at finding the truth because they are easier for others to replicate and test, and this is the best evidence of something that is true and important, because things that work tend to be copied. They also expose dopey reasoning and overfitting, because readers can understand them. Complexity does not overcome overfitting, it just hides it better.

Richard Feynman - Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.

Richard Feynman - I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned.

Galileo Galilei (in a letter to Mark Wesler, 1612) - For in the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man. Italian original: Sì perché l'autorità dell'opinione di mille nelle scienze non val per una scintilla di ragione di un solo.

Murray Gell-Mann (1994) - A scientist would rather use someone else's toothbrush than another scientist's terminology.

Dan Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness - The average newspaper boy in Pittsburgh knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo, or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name.

Roger Gould (in Collision of wills, 2003) - The default assumption in many natural sciences is that until a potential factor has been shown to be important, it is assumed not to be. In the human sciences, the contrary holds: one must demonstrate that a factor is not relevant before disregarding it.

H. L. Mencken - For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Robert Pogue Harrison - Academic disciplines are more committed to methodology than truth.

Werner Heisenberg - We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Ernest Lawrence (Nobel Prize acceptance speech - February 29th, 1940) - The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past.

David McRaney - When you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal. You prefer to see causes rather than effects, signals in the noise, patterns in the randomness. You prefer easy-to-understand stories, and thus turn everything in life into a narrative so that complicated problems become easy. Scientists work to remove the narrative, to boil it away, leaving behind only the raw facts.

Albert Michelson (1894) - The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered.

John von Neumann - If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

John von Neumann - Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Friedrich Nietzsche (in Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, 1874) - The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not “harmonious” natures: they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller, though their books are bigger. German original: Gut, die Wissenschaft ist in den letzten Jahrzehnten erstaunlich schnell gefördert worden: aber seht euch nun auch die Gelehrten, die erschöpften Hennen an. Es sind wahrhaftig keine »harmonischen« Naturen; nur gackern können sie mehr als je, weil sie öfter Eier legen: freilich sind auch die Eier immer kleiner (obzwar die Bücher immer dicker) geworden. 

Steven Pinker - In the spirit of [Malcolm] Gladwell [best-seller writer, who quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” instead of eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra] who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

Max Planck (in Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie, 1948) - A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing it 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. German original: Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist.

Naval Ravikant (2020) - Evolution works by mutation and selection. Innovation works by trial and error. Science works by conjecture and criticism. Free markets work by entrepreneurship and risk. All truth-seeking systems work roughly the same way. 

Alfréd Rényi (about his colleague Paul Erdős) - A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Álvaro de Rújula (about cosmologists) - Never in doubt, but seldom right.

Bertrand Russell (1929) - Probability is the most important notion in modern science, especially as nobody has the slightest notion what it means.

Seneca (Epistulae, 88.27) - Magnum esse solem philosophus probabit, quantus sit mathematicus. While the philosopher says the sun is large, the mathematician takes its measure.

John Maynard Smith (1988) - There is always fame to be won in science by killing the king.

Karl Smith on categorizing epidemics - If it spreads along lines of communication, the cause is information. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. But if it's everywhere, all at once the cause is a molecule.

Keith E. Stanovich - Science is a mechanism for continually challenging previously held beliefs by subjecting them to empirical tests in such a way that they can be shown to be wrong. This characteristic often puts science — particularly psychology — in conflict with so-called folk wisdom or common sense.

Traditional - I will believe in homeopathy when I will be able to pay my taxes with an empty plastic bag that once held banknotes.

Carol Tavris (in Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, 2002) - Pseudoscience is popular because it confirms what we believe; science is unpopular because it makes us question what we believe. Good science, like good art, often upsets our established ways of seeing the world.

Wilfred Trotter (1941) - The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

Alfred North Whitehead - Seek simplicity and distrust it.