Scientific Abstraction Quotes

The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen. ~ Fritz Haber

Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. ... ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It's one thing to predict [the complete breakdown of civilization]. It's something else again to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing ... for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality ... It was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract. ~ Isaac Asimov

Even now, after overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, we are still discussing the issue as if it were a belief, not a fact. ~ Mary Pipher

A combination of both Biblical and scientific knowledge together with spiritual and physical understanding will help you to become the best of the best in the sphere of your activity. ~ Sunday Adelaja

Over and over, expanding scientific knowledge has shown religious claims to be false. ~ Paul D. Boyer

Governments should want and even crave the best possible scientific advice. With reliable knowledge come better decisions, fewer mistakes and more results achieved for each pound spent. ~ Geoff Mulgan

Then, in the late summer of 1790, Humboldt began to study finance and economics at the academy of trade in Hamburg. He hated it for it was all numbers and account books. In his spare time, Humboldt delved into scientific treatises and travel book, he learned Danish and Swedish - anything was better than his business studies. Whenever he could, he walked down to the River Elbe in Hamburg where he watched the large merchant vessels that brought tobacco, rice and indigo from the United States. The 'sight of the ships in the harbour', he told a friend, was what held him together - a symbol of his hopes and dreams. He couldn't wait to be finally the 'master of his own luck'. ~ Andrea Wulf

The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is needed to explain scientific facts, and that higher knowledge is mathematics. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

The books talked about it [the heart] as if it were a sump pump stuck down in the muck and mire of somebody's backyard. Never in all my scientific reading did I encounter anything that talked about a broken heart. Never did I read anything about what the heart felt, how it felt or why it felt. Feeling and knowing weren't important, only understanding ~ Charles Martin

But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. ~ Carl Sagan

The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals. ~ Thomas Sowell

Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case. ~ Peter Medawar

Without empathy and love there is no morality, no altruism, no compassion for others. The scientific mindset, like the artistic and spiritual ones, must be passionate and not easily dissuaded from its path. Although, the empirical mindset must be ever more vigilant than the artist because there is much more at stake than just individual freedom, there is the very basis for truthful inquiry. ~ Leviak B. Kelly

We can look high or we can look low in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system. ~ Michael Behe

There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished. ~ Michel Gondry

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific. ~ Frank Luntz

There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour. ~ Charles Lamb

I will tell you the deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole in the top, also, the water spurts out below."
"Isn't that obvious?" I said. "Air enters at the top and presses the water down."
"A typical scientific explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second place, but why it refuses to come out in the first case."
"And why does it refuse?" Garamond asked eagerly.
"Because, if it came out, it would leave a vacuum in the vessel, and nature abhors a vacuum. Nequaquam vacui was a Rosicrucian principle, which modern science has forgotten."
"Excuse me," Belbo said to Agliè, "but your argument is simply post hoc ergo ante hoc. What follows causes what came before.
You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn't. Nature doesn't; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West. ~ Umberto Eco

If you turn to a branch of those sciences that try to give a solution to the questions of life--to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology--there you will find an astounding poverty of thought, a very great lack of clarity, completely unjustified claims to answer questions that lie outside their subject and never-ending contradictions between one thinker and others, and even within himself.

If you turn to a branch of the sciences that is not concerned with solving the questions of life but answers its own scientific, specialized questions, then you are captivated by the power of human intellect but you know in advance that there are no answers to the questions of life.

These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.

They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Reliable scientific knowledge is value free and has no moral or ethical value. Science tells us how the world is ... Dangers and ethical issue arise only when science is applied as technology. ~ Lewis Wolpert

Nothing is more vulnerable and ephemeral than scientific theories, which are mere tools and not everlasting truths. ~ C. G. Jung

The real determinant of society is hidden behind the state and the economy: it is the way in which our everyday activity is organised, the subordination of our doing to the dictates of abstract labour, that is, of value, money, profit. It is this abstraction which is, after all, the very existence of the state. If we want to change society, we must stop the subordination of our activity to abstract labour, do something else. ~ John Holloway

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse. ~ Jean Francois Lyotard

Great scientific minds are shaped early by unforgettable experiences . . . and some miracle moments. ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire. ~ Kary Mullis

It wouldn't be easy with this man. He had trouble written all over him.
But there was something else too ... There was something in his eyes that gave her an absolute surety that he'd be worth the struggle.
She expected scientific proof of many things. But sometimes fate was just fate. And he was hers. ~ Lauren Dane

By observing natural scientific discoveries through a perception deepened by meditation, we can develop a new awareness of reality. This awareness could become the bedrock of a spirituality that is not based on the dogmas of a given religion, but on insights into a higher and deeper meaning. I am referring to the ability to recognize, to read, and to understand the firsthand revelations. ~ Albert Hofmann

Many American boys that fought in WWII had been sterilized under eugenic laws passed by the the United States Supreme Court under the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell. Over 80,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized under that legal precedent. Coincidentally, Buck v Bell is also the legal precedent cited in Roe v. Wade, the famous abortion rights case. ~ A.E. Samaan

Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad. ~ Paul Samuelson

If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 19½ per cent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a per cent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic to swim in that half a per cent, asking the questions through which some progress can be made. ~ Hermann Bondi

In fact, numerous scientific laboratory tests and field observations have led to the conclusion that animals are conscious, intelligent, emotional beings. They are not machines and truly feel physical pain when it is inflicted upon them. They are capable of experiencing a wide range of emotions, including loneliness, embarrassment, sadness, longing, depression, anxiety, panic, and fear, as well as joy, relief, surprise, happiness, contentment, and peace. ~ Sharon Gannon

some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic. ~ Neal Stephenson

But we as a culture have lost the deep intuitive understanding that Creation exists on many levels. We have succumbed to the scientific viewpoint. Nothing characterizes 'the modern world' more completely than the loss of faith in Transcendence, our arrogant lack of any genuine appreciation for levels of reality above our little everyday affairs. The deepest wounds to the human soul have been caused by our lack of appreciation of levels. By shutting the door on transcendence, we have cut off any light from that world that might have illuminated this one, leaving us in darkness,leaving us with nothing but a dead world where scientists are merely performing an autopsy. ~ Andrew Cort

Everyone always has to have the rational, scientific explanation for something, even if it's so obviously wrong you could scream. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty until found effective. ~ Edward Teller

Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn't offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion. ~ Edward Snowden

Our society has lost confidence in the power of reason, except perhaps scientific reason. ~ Timothy Radcliffe