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Post by Tamrin on Apr 22, 2010 9:57:42 GMT 10
There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any asssertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors
J. Robert Oppenheimer (Born this day 1904)
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Post by Tamrin on Jun 21, 2010 7:08:30 GMT 10
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality
Mary McCarthy (Born this day 1912)
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Post by Tamrin on Jul 18, 2010 10:40:22 GMT 10
Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition
It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers
Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen
Each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent
As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice — there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community... this issue of paradigm choice can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone
We may... have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth... The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything
Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progressThomas Kuhn, US physicist and philosopher and historian of science (Born this day 1922) Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different kind of thinking-cap', one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic
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Post by Tamrin on Sept 5, 2010 10:48:23 GMT 10
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life
Arthur Koestler (Born this day 1905)
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Post by Tamrin on Sept 6, 2010 7:28:26 GMT 10
Let us unite on the safe and sure ground of fact and experiment, and we can never err; yet better, we can never differ
Frances Wright (Born this day 1795)
If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you
Robert M Pirsig (Born this day 1928)
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Post by Tamrin on Sept 10, 2010 6:51:46 GMT 10
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos
Stephen Jay Gould (Born this day 1941)
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Post by Tamrin on Nov 7, 2010 11:30:25 GMT 10
Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one
Konrad Lorenz (Born this day 1903)
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Post by Tamrin on Nov 9, 2010 6:18:36 GMT 10
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken', and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again
When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He pre- ferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions; that is the heart of science
There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny
Carl Sagan (Born this day 1934)
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Post by Tamrin on Nov 15, 2010 5:57:54 GMT 10
So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science, the offspring, to divulge the hidden cause of things
However, before we come to special creation, which puts an end to all discussion: I think we should try everything else
Some of what these pamphlets [of astrological forecasts] say will turn out to be true, but most of it time and experience will expose as empty and worthless. The latter part will be forgotten [literally: written on the winds] while the former will be carefully entered in people's memories, as is usual with the crowd
Johann Kepler (Died this day 1630)
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Post by Tamrin on Mar 22, 2012 5:46:39 GMT 10
Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment
Robert Andrews Millikan (Born this day 1868)
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