SCIENCE Quotes Collected by Ken Knowlton |
Even when laws have been written down, they
ought not always to remain unaltered. Art upsets, science reassures. Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented. Art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.
Art upsets, science reassures. Every thoughtful man who hopes for the creation of a contemporary culture
knows that this hinges on one central problem: to find a coherent relation
between science and the humanities. There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure
science — that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and
leaving them to direct themselves. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Scientists are explorers, philosophers are just tourists. It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination
in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that
of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something
great that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with
what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been
thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber,
if he has common sense on the ground floor. [U]ngovernable creativity in science and invention has re-enforced
unconscious demonic drives that have placed our whole civilization in
a state of perilous unbalance: all the more because we have cast away
at this critical moment, as an affront to our rationality, man's earliest
forms of moral discipline and self-control. Science now makes all things possible, as Bacon believed: but it does
not thereby make all possible things desirable. It is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has been
assimilated into twentieth-century art. Reality is that which, when you don't believe it, doesn't go away.
Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification
— crude, rough, and unsymmetrical. But in nature every
bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details
are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within
boxes. |