This week I devote my column to a selection of quotations, mostly from well-known scientists, to illustrate their conceptions of the nature of science.
What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing. Aristotle (384-322 BC), the Greek philosopher and advocate of reason. Until the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, his influence on Western philosophy and science was so enormous he was simply called the Philosopher.
Give me but one firm place on which to stand, and I will move the earth. Archimedes (287-212 BC), the Greek mathematician, speaking of the lever.
In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Italian mathematician, astronomer and physicist,
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History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we live. It knows the names of the kings' bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. Henri Fabre (1823-1915), French entomologist.
Nevertheless, paradigm changes do cause scientists to see the world of their research engagements differently. Insofar as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world. Thomas Kuhn (1922-), US historian and philosopher of science who showed that cultural and social conditions affect science's direction. He contends that scientific knowledge is relative, depending on the particular theoretical framework (paradigm) dominant at the time. Paradigms are so powerful - Darwinism, for example - they are uncritically accepted by most scientists until a scientific revolution establishes a new paradigm.
No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. The most he can hope for is the kindly contempt earned by the utopian politician. If politics is the art of the possible, research is the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical minded affairs. Peter Medawar (1915-1987), a British immunologist who shared the 1960 Nobel Prize.
The crocodile cannot turn its head. Like science, it must always go forward with all-devouring jaws. Peter Kapitza (18941984), a Soviet physicist who shared the 1978 Nobel Prize.
Its [science's] effectiveness is almost inevitable because it narrows the possibility of refutation and failure. Science begins by saying it can only answer this type of question and ends by saying these are the only questions that can be asked. Once the implications and shallowness of this trick are fully realised, science will be humbled and we shall be free to celebrate ourselves once again. Bryan Appleyard, journalist and writer. The quotation is from his influential book Understanding the Present.
True science thrives best in glass houses where everyone can look in. When the windows are blacked out, as in war, the weeds take over; when secrecy muffles criticism, charlatans and cranks flourish. Max Perutz (1914-), Austrian biochemist who s hared the 1962 Nobel Prize for X-ray developments.
Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), an Austrian-born US philosopher of science.
Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (18931986), Hungarian biochemist and 1937 Nobel Prize winner.
Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Thomas Edison (1847-1931), the US inventor and scientist. He had over 1,000 patents.
Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question how? But it gets terribly confused when you ask the question why? Erwin Chargaff (1905-), a Czech-born biochemist and DNA pioneer.
No entry to Jews and Members of the German Physical Society. Philip Lenard (1862-1947). The German physicist and 1905 Nobel Prize recipient. He spent the later years of his life reviling Einstein and Jewish scientists. The quotation is the notice he posted on his office door.
I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about the problem of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Albert Einstein (1879-1955). German physicist who formulated the theories of relativity. His Nobel Prize for Physics came in 1921.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. Isaac Newton (1642-1727). The English physicist and mathematician who laid the foundation of modern physics. Newton was not a humble man. This beautiful quotation was a notable exception.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Albert Einstein.
William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry and director of microscopy at UCC