Quotes & Sayings About Materials Science

[Modern science] passed through a long period of uncertainty and inconclusive experiment, but as the instrumental aids to research improved, and the results of observation accumulated, phantoms of the imagination were exorcised, idols of the cave were shattered, trustworthy materials were obtained for logical treatment, and hypotheses by long and careful trial were converted into theories. — Thomas George Bonney

The materials are mostly from living beings - living human beings. They need to be alive to extract the necessary materials. — Brad McKinniss

Necessity is not the mother of invention. Knowledge and experiment are its parents. It sometimes happens that successful search is made for unknown materials to fill well-recognized and predetermined requirements. It more often happens that the acquirement of knowledge of the previously unknown properties of a material suggests its trial for some new use. These facts strongly indicate the value of knowledge of properties of materials and indicate a way for research. — Willis R. Whitney

One attempt to avoid the problem of induction involves weakening the demand that scientific knowledge be proven true, and resting content with the claim that scientific claims can be shown to be probably true in the light of the evidence. So the vast number of observations that can be invoked to support the claim that materials denser than air fall diWInwards on earth, although it does not permit us to prove the truth of the claim, does warrant the assertion that the claim is probably true. — Alan F. Chalmers

As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible
or at least visible, at least discussible
those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science's tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts, and of all ideas to forms. — Annie Dillard

I'm a huge science fan; I read a lot of science books. But I'm not a scientist, my interest in science is I love the facts, but I like to interpret those facts. They become the raw materials for stories and paintings and things. — Dave McKean

The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task. — G.H. Hardy

Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural — Jonah Lehrer

In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control ... Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and "charitable" acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained. — Murray Bookchin

The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product. — Seymour Papert

Nuclear terrorism is still often treated as science fiction. I wish it were. But unfortunately we live in a world of excess hazardous materials and abundant technological know-how, in which some terrorists clearly state their intention to inflict catastrophic casualties. Were such an attack to occur, it would not only cause widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy ... [creating] a second death toll throughout the developing world. — Kofi Annan

Innumerable entirely new compounds have been produced in the last century. The artificial dye-stuffs, prepared from materials occurring in coal-tar, make the natural colours blush. Saccharin, which is hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, is a purely artificial substance. New explosives, drugs, alloys, photographic substances, essences, scents, solvents, and detergents are being poured out in a continuous stream. — Frederick Soddy

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. — Richard Feynman

Instruction in academia did not emphasize what I thought of as essential points. I was interested in the broad range of interrelated connections within the physical sciences, but formal studies isolated each branch of science. I feel that I have advantages greater than Da Vinci's such as access to more information, materials, and methods. — Jacque Fresco

Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind. — Paul Kriwaczek

Biologically inspired materials could revolutionize materials science. People looking at spider silk and abalone shells are looking for new ways to make materials better, cheaper, and with less toxic byproducts. — Janine Benyus

In a very real way, then, materials are a reflection of who we are, a multi-scale expression of our human need and desires. — Mark Miodownik

Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only. — Max Muller

The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better. — Nathan Myhrvold

As we gain more knowledge about materials and processes in the universe, that could open up benefits that we can't even imagine. But you have to be willing to fund science without knowledge of the benefits. — Fred Kavli

To be worthy of the name, an experimenter must be at once theorist and practitioner. While he must completely master the art of establishing experimental facts, which are the materials of science, he must also clearly understand the scientific principles which guide his reasoning through the varied experimental study of natural phenomena. We cannot separate these two things: head and hand. An able hand, without a head to direct it, is a blind tool; the head is powerless without its executive hand. — Claude Bernard

Although the universe itself isn't a conscious entity, it possesses the raw materials that, when properly set into motion, create consciousness. It has the ability to create intelligent life, which is capable of understanding the universe ... It can know itself indirectly — Arthur Byron Cover

[Coleridge] selected an instance of what was called the sublime, in DARWIN, who imagined the creation of the universe to have taken place in a moment, by the explosion of a mass of matter in the womb, or centre of space. In one and the same instant of time, suns and planets shot into systems in every direction, and filled and spangled the illimitable void! He asserted this to be an intolerable degradation -referring, as it were, all the beauty and harmony of nature to something like the bursting of a barrel of gunpowder! that spit its combustible materials into a pock-freckled creation! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science. — Horace Mann

It is obvious that while science is struggling to bring Heaven to earth some men are using its materials in the construction of Hell. — Herbert Hoover

The unholy alliance of science, technology, and industry has given birth to monstrous offspring that threaten the very future of the planet. From factory farming to the harvesting of human eggs, commodified science and technology comes with a utilitarian ethic. Life is cheap. Forests, animals, and people are raw materials. Everyone and everything is expendable.50 Whatever brings the greatest profit is worth the violence. God is calling the church in the night to retrieve the meaning of stewardship first and foremost as caring for the earth.51 Evangelism is not good news until it is good news for all of creation, for humanity, animals, plants, water, and soil, for the earth that God created and called good. — Elaine A. Heath

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. — Michael Denton

We live in a scientific age, yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the way, the how and the why for everything in our experience. — Rachel Carson

We used to think God made us in His image, and that meant we were special, until science told us we just evolved that way because it suited a landscape of trees and savannas. That's what science does: it says, look again and you'll see you're not special. But economics? Economics is also a science. And what does it say? ... It says: there is energy, and there are raw materials, and that's the cosmos. But without us the energy is random and the raw material is inert. It's only labour that makes the cosmos come alive. It's only us that make economics happen at all. And that makes us special. — Adam Roberts

...If we can achieve this, then one day whole rooms, buildings, perhaps even bridges may generate their own energy, funnel it to where it is needed, detect damage, and self-heal. If this seems like science fiction, bear in mind that it is only what living materials do already. — Mark Miodownik

I am apt, however, to entertain a Suspicion, that the World is still too young to fix any general stable Truths in Politics, which will remain true to the latest Posterity. We have not as yet had Experience of above three thousand Years; so that not only the Art of Reasoning is still defective in this Science, as well as in all others, but we even want sufficient Materials, upon which we can reason. 'Tis not sufficiently known, what Degrees of Refinement, either in Virtue or Vice, human Nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of Mankind from any great Revolution in their Education, Customs, or Principles. — David Hume

Keep a sharp lookout upon your materials; get rid of every pound of material you can do without; put to yourself the question what business has it to be there?, avoid complexities, and make everything as simple as possible. — Henry Maudslay

Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space. Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale. Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones. Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The dynamics seem so basic - shapes changing in space and time - yet only now are the tools available to understand them. — James Gleick

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations. — Svante Arrhenius

An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval "soup." In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimilation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy. — R.W. Van Bemmelen

Having lasted for 4,000 years, the use of nature's materials to express ideas about nature may be expected to continue. The best garden designs are produced with an awareness of the art, science, history, geography, philosophy, social habits and construction techniques of their period. — Tom Turner

Polymeric materials in the form of wood, bone, skin and fibers have been used by man since prehistoric time. Although organic chemistry as a science dates back to the eighteenth century, polymer science on a molecular basis is a development of the twentieth century. — Alan J. Heeger

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God. — C.S. Lewis

Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world. — Richard Dawkins