Science

"Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down." Sir Fred Hoyle

"Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings." Neil Postman

"So, what you learn when you study science in general, but astrophysics especially, is that you no longer invoke your senses to judge what makes sense, or you no longer invoke your personal philosophies to judge what should be true. The universe is what it is, and it really doesn't care about your senses." Neil deGrasse Tyson

"There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination." Denis Diderot

"I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy." Fred Hoyle

"misguided to ask whether the Big Bang theory would provide evidence for or against a scriptural story of Creation; the Big Bang Theory is a scientific theory, concerned with physical causes that are proximate and contingent. And it’s wrong to ask whether a scriptural story of Creation would provide evidence for or against the Big Bang theory; scriptural stories of Creation are concerned with ultimate origins and with humanity’s personal relationship with God. Those are the wrong questions for the tools at hand." Guy Consolmagno

"Science doesn't stop when it comes up with a nice answer. It looks for more data. It comes up with new ideas. It's willing to admit it's wrong." Guy Consolmagno

"If we would serve science, we must extend her limits, not only as far as our own knowledge is concerned, but in the estimation of others." Rudolf Virchow

"The task of science, therefore, is not to attack the objects of faith, but to establish the limits beyond which knowledge cannot go and found a unified self-consciousness within these limits." Rudolf Virchow

"Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress" Paul Feyerabend

""Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice." Thomas Kuhn

"Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not." Allan Bloom

"To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers." Thomas Kuhn

"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." Thomas Kuhn