Quotes & Sayings About Advances In Science

The world changes materially. Science makes advances in technology and understanding. But the world of humanity doesn't change. — Pierre Schaeffer

One of the chief inhibitions to human progress arises because of the extreme slowness with which the advances in knowledge become translated into action for the benefit of society as a whole. There is no step more important for the removal of that inhibition than that of providing for intimate contact between the leaders in the fields of pure and applied science. — Robert Andrews Millikan

Advances in science and medical research and public health policies have meant that life expectancy for Australians is one of the highest in the world. — Julie Bishop

When you apply computer science and machine learning to areas that haven't had any innovation in 50 years, you can make rapid advances that seem really incredible. — Bill Maris

War created the conditions for great advances in technology...without war men would not traverse oceans in hours, travel in space, or microwave popcorn. — Adrian R. Lewis

What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial ...
[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick. — Betty Friedan

I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth towards the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur is succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity. — Stephen Jay Gould

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. — Albert Einstein

Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious. — Kenneth R. Miller

When I contemplate the immense advances in science and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches. — Thomas Jefferson

The Age of Intellect is accompanied by surprising advances in natural science. In the ninth century, for example, in the age of Mamun, the Arabs measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass before Western Europe discovered that the world was not flat. Less than fifty years after the amazing scientific discoveries under Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful and beneficent as was the progress of science, it did not save the empire from chaos. — John Bagot Glubb

The advances of science and technology will bring us to the greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham: how much to retrofit the human genotype. Shall it be a lot, a little bit, or none at all? The choice will be forced on us because our species has begun to cross what is the most important yet still least examined threshold in the technoscientific era. We are about to abandon natural selection, the process that created us, in order to direct our own evolution by volitional selection - the process of redesigning our biology and human nature as we wish them to be. — Edward O. Wilson

Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition ... we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science. — Gregory Bateson

It is a fact of life that oversimplified accounts of the development of science are often necessary in its teaching. Most scientific progress is a messy, complex and slow process; only with the hindsight of an overall understanding of a phenomenon can a story be told pedagogically rather than chronologically. This necessitates the distilling of certain events and personalities from the melee: those who are deemed to have made the most important contributions. It is inevitable therefore that the many smaller or less important advances scattered randomly across hundreds of years of scientific history tend to be swept up like autumn leaves into neat piles, on top of which sit larger-than-life personalities credited with taking a discipline forward in a single jump. Sometimes this is perfectly valid, and one cannot deny the genius of an Aristotle, a Newton, a Darwin or an Einstein. But it often leaves behind forgotten geniuses and unsung heroes. — Jim Al-Khalili

[...] if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like'. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.
[review of The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, Nature 442, 983-984 (31 August 2006)] — Jerry A. Coyne

Taxonomy, also called systematics, is the science-based hierarchical classification of the world's species. The area had traditionally been an obscure academic discipline dominated by erudite and professional dons who would memorize and interpret thousands of Latin species names. Advances seldom made the newspapers and caustic disputes lingered in the dust scientific literature for generations. That academic innocence would be lost forever when precise taxonomic recognition of species and subspecies came to be the basis for protection under the Endangered Species Act. — Stephen J. O'Brien

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. — Carl Sagan

Science is an inherent contradiction - systematic wonder - applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming's eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it - a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria - and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory? — Thomas Lewis

I only have so much ring time that my body can endure. I've had four surgeries on my knees, arthritis in my neck, separated my shoulders, broken my nose. I'm just gonna hope that science advances faster than I can deteriorate. Because what am I gonna do? Put a perfect body into the ground? What's the point of that? — Ronda Rousey

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science. — K. Lee Lerner

One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did — Bertrand Russell

We must have increasing participation within the scientific community and reasonable scientific discussion, putting aside the stigma that UFOs are voodoo science before any real advances can be made in understanding the real nature of the UFO phenomenon. — Larry Holcombe

Neoclassical economics has effectively insulated itself from the great advances made in science and engineering over the last 40 years. This self-imposed isolation must come to an end. For while the concepts of neoclassical economics appear difficult, they are actually quaint in comparison to the sophistication evident in today's mathematics, engineering, computing, evolutionary biology and physics. In order to advance, economics must humbly submit to learning from disciplines that it has studiously ignored for so long. Some researchers in outside fields have called for the wholesale replacement of standard economics curricula, using at least the building blocks of modern thought inherent in other disciplines. — Steve Keen

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances. — Herbert Spencer

I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do. — Linus Torvalds

In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery. — Isaac Asimov

To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science. — Isaac Newton

The solutions put forth by imperialism are the quintessence of simplicity ... When they speak of the problems of population and birth, they are in no way moved by concepts related to the interests of the family or of society ... Just when science and technology are making incredible advances in all fields, they resort to technology to suppress revolutions and ask the help of science to prevent population growth. In short, the peoples are not to make revolutions, and women are not to give birth. This sums up the philosophy of imperialism. — Fidel Castro

Advances in science help to delegitimize the rule of kings and the power of the Church. — Karl Marx

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on. — Stanislaw Lem

As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It's a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It, could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that's no longer God's realm. — Carl Sagan

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated. — Leon Kass

The most powerful influence exercised by the Arabs on general natural physics was that directed to the advances of chemistry ; a science for which this race created a new era.( ... ) Besides making laudatory mention of that which we owe to the natural science of the Arabs in both the terrestrial and celestial spheres, we must likewise allude to their contributions in separate paths of intellectual development to the general mass of mathematical science. — Alexander Von Humboldt

Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of discovery and clarification, which is a pleasure to study in itself, gives the average person access to insights that not even Darwin or Einstein possessed, and offers the promise of near-miraculous advances in healing, in energy, and in peaceful exchange between different cultures. Yet millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice. — Christopher Hitchens

It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past ... The problem is basically theological, and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, and literature, and all material and cultural developments in the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh. — Douglas MacArthur

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy. — Edward Teller

I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being thrilled by the incredible advances being made in physics and science. — Michio Kaku

While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. — Robert S. Mulliken

A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life. — Richard Ford

Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society. — J. Michael Bishop

We are convinced that the education of the future will be of an entirely spontaneous nature; certainly we can not as yet realize it, but the evolution of methods in the direction of a wider comprehension of the phenomena of life, and the fact that all advances toward perfection mean the overcoming of restraint,--all this indicates that we are in the right when we hope for the deliverance of the child through science. — Francisco Ferrer

For all the advances in technology, science and communications, there are signs that we are failing in areas where it matters most: our personal relationships and society in general. The atomisation of society evidenced by the startling increase in recent decades of single person households and the identification of loneliness and isolation as one of our most pressing new social problems, should give us cause for concern. — Cory Bernardi

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare. — Daniel Dennett

The science and technology which have advanced man safely into space have brought about startling medical advances for man on earth. Out of space research have come new knowledge, techniques and instruments which have enabled some bedridden invalids to walk, the totally deaf to hear, the voiceless to talk, and, in the foreseeable future, may even make it possible for the blind to "see." — Hubertus Strughold

The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences. — John Cage

It would be interesting to inquire how many times essential advances in science have first been made possible by the fact that the boundaries of special disciplines were not respected ... Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science. — Wolfgang Kohler

In the field of Artificial Intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test, when a computer convinces a sufficient number of interrogators into believing that it is not a machine but rather is a human. It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British Science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting. — Kevin Warwick

Science has made many advances in my lifetime, but the instrument has yet to be invented that can see clearly into the marriage of a man and a woman. — Guillermo Del Toro

As soon as science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a theory. The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations, and it is just here that the 'truth' of the theory lies. — Albert Einstein

Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden; to cast a glance at the next advances of
our science and at the secrets of its development during future centuries? What particular goals will there be toward
which the leading mathematical spirits of coming generations will strive? What new methods and new facts in the
wide and rich field of mathematical thought will the new centuries disclose? — David Hilbert

My worry is that other advances in science may result in other means of
mass destruction, maybe more readily available even than nuclear weapons.
Genetic engineering is quite a possible area, because of these dreadful
developments that are taking place there. — Joseph Rotblat

Modern life seems to recede further and further away from nature, and closely connected with this fact we seem to be losing the feeling of reverence towards nature. It is probably inevitable when science and machinery, capitalism and materialism go hand in hand so far in a most remarkably successful manner. Mysticism, which is the life of religion in whatever sense we understand it, has come to be relegated altogether in the background. Without a certain amount of mysticism there is no appreciation for the feeling of reverence, and, along with it, for the spiritual significance of humility. Science and scientific technique have done a great deal for humanity; but as far as our spiritual welfare is concerned we have not made any advances over that attained by our forefathers. In fact we are suffering at present the worst kind of unrest all over the world. — D.T. Suzuki

Political philosophy reaches for the best regime, a regime so good that it can hardly exist. Political science advances a theory - in fact, a number of theories - that promises to bring agreement and put an end to partisan dispute. — Harvey Mansfield

By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may make advances in morality (which is the science, by way of eminence, of living well and being happy), but all mankind together is making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older. So that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man who never ceases to live and learn. — Blaise Pascal

Though advances in imaging technology have allowed neuroscientists to grasp much of the basic topography of the brain, and studies of neurons have given us a clear picture of what happens inside and between individual brain cells, science is still relatively clueless about what transpires in the circuitry of the cortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain that allows us to plan into the future, do long division, and write poetry, and which holds most of our memories. — Joshua Foer

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. — Milton Friedman

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century. — Stephen Hawking

In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody's predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984. — Aldous Huxley

All revolutionary advances in science may consist less of sudden and dramatic revelations than a series of transformations, of which the revolutionary significance may not be seen (except afterwards, by historians) until the last great step. In many cases the full potentiality and force of a most radical step in such a sequence of transformations may not even be manifest to its author. — I. Bernard Cohen

Sciences usually advances by a succession of small steps, through a fog in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts, an eminence is gained, and a wider stretch of territory can be surveyed-sometimes with startling results. A whole science may then seem to undergo a kaleidoscopic rearrangement, fragments of knowledge sometimes being found to fit together in a hitherto unsuspected manner. Sometimes the shock of readjustment may spread to other sciences; sometimes it may divert the whole current of human thought. — James Jeans

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care. — Laurie Garrett

Thousands of years ago, weren't we capable of building enormous structures like the pyramids? Weren't we capable of worshiping gods, weaving, making fire, finding lovers and wives, sending written messages? Of course we were. But although we've succeeded in replacing slaves with wage slaves, all the advances we've made have been in the field of science. Human beings are still asking the same questions as their ancestors. In short, they haven't evolved at all. — Paulo Coelho

The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did. — Isaac Asimov

To me there never has been a higher source of honour or distinction than that connected with advances in science. I have not possessed enough of the eagle in my character to make a direct flight to the loftiest altitudes in the social world; and I certainly never endeavored to reach those heights by using the creeping powers of the reptile, who in ascending, generally chooses the dirtiest path, because it is the easiest. — Humphry Davy

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. — Christopher Hitchens

Certain elements of today's ecological crisis reveal its moral character. First among these is the indiscriminate application of advances in science and technology. Many recent discoveries have brought undeniable benefits to humanity. Indeed, they demonstrate the nobility of the human vocation to participate responsibly in God's creative action in the world. Unfortunately, it is now clear that the application of these discoveries in the fields of industry and agriculture have produced harmful long-term effects. — Pope John Paul II

Science advances by trial and error. When mistakes are made, the peer-review publication process usually roots them out. Cuccinelli's version of the scientific process would be "make an error and go to trial." Einstein did not arrive at E=mc2 in his first attempt. If he were working in the state of Virginia under Cuccinelli today, he could be jailed for his initial mistakes and perhaps never achieve that landmark equation. — Scott Mandia

The world can seem very chaotic these days. Humankind is constantly changing, and evolving. Advances in science have made it possible to travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours. We can keep in touch with people we care about and even with the world at large with the push of a button. Many of the diseases that plagued humankind for centuries have been wiped out. Yet there is still poverty. There is still famine. There is still disease. There is still war. There is still injustice. — The Prophet Of Life

Indeed, we need not look back half a century to times which many now living remember well, and see the wonderful advances in the sciences and arts which have been made within that period. Some of these have rendered the elements themselves subservient to the purposes of man, have harnessed them to the yoke of his labors and effected the great blessings of moderating his own, of accomplishing what was beyond his feeble force, and extending the comforts of life to a much enlarged circle, to those who had before known its necessaries only. — Thomas Jefferson

Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce. — Joseph Rotblat

The life and soul of science is its practical application, and just as the great advances in mathematics have been made through the desire of discovering the solution of problems which were of a highly practical kind in mathematical science, so in physical science many of the greatest advances that have been made from the beginning of the world to the present time have been made in the earnest desire to turn the knowledge of the properties of matter to some purpose useful to mankind. — Lord Kelvin

Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours. — Freeman Dyson

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them — Stephen Hawking

We live in an exciting time. We now know more than ever about our biology and about our history, allowing us to peer into the future with greater clarity than has previously been possible. But at the same time, the changes we are undergoing, brought about by our own advances in technology, medicine, transportation-- and by the growing impact we are having on the world around us-- mean that we live in a time in which the future looks increasingly less like the past. We have become an odd species, indeed, but our story is not yet over. Like all species, Homo sapiens continues to evolve, so there is one thing we can say with certainty: the people of tomorrow will not be the same as the people of today. — Scott Solomon

God, once imagined to be an omnipresent force throughout the whole world of nature and man. has been increasingly tending to seem omniabsent. Everywhere, intelligent and educated people rely more and more on purely secular and scientific techniques for the solution of their problems. As science advances, belief in divine miracles and the efficacy of prayer becomes fainter and fainter. — Corliss Lamont

The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. — Freeman Dyson

Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality ... And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'. — Karl Popper

Science literacy consists in the ability and the desire to follow reports of new scientific advances, throughout your whole life. — Philip Kitcher

It is rather ironical that in the sixteenth century some people resisted advances in science because they seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the twentieth century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God. — John C. Lennox

The situation with regard to insulin is particularly clear. In many parts of the world diabetic children still die from lack of this hormone ... [T]hose of us who search for new biological facts and for new and better therapeutic weapons should appreciate that one of the central problems of the world is the more equitable distribution and use of the medical and nutritional advances which have already been established. The observations which I have recently made in parts of Africa and South America have brought this fact very forcible to my attention. — Charles Herbert Best