Rupert Sheldrake Quotes

My three years at the NIH were critical in my scientific education. I learned an immense amount about the research process: developing assays, purifying macromolecules, documenting a discovery by many approaches, and writing clear manuscripts describing what is known and what remains to be investigated.

The ideas of science germinate in a matrix of established knowledge gained by experiment; they are not lonesome thoughts, born in a rarified realm where no researcher has ever gone before.

Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.

I wanted to be a scientist. My undergraduate degree is in biology, and I really did think I might go off and be some kind of a lady Darwin someplace. It turned out that I'm really awful at science and that I have no gift for actually doing science myself. But I'm very interested in others who practice science and in the stories of science.

I am a caricature of what British science is about in the way I work.

But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods.

We have this very clean picture of science, you know, these well-established rules with which we make predictions. But when you're really doing science, when you're doing research, you're at the edge of what we know.

I guess it's inevitable that I would become somebody who would write about scientists.

Experimentalists never know when their work is finished.

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

Experimental investigation, to borrow a phrase employed by Kepler respecting the testing of hypotheses, is "a very great thief of time." Sometimes it costs many days to determine a fact that can be stated in a line.

All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself.

Science is really about describing the way the universe works in one aspect or another in all branches of science—how a life-form works, how this works, how that works. ... You have to have a natural curiosity for that.

In basic research, intellectual rigor and sentimental freedom necessarily alternate.

I'm a real amateur enthusiast for science.

My dream was to be a 'scientist' even before I knew what a scientist did.

The scientific method is about trying to remove our own bias and subjectivity, and be as objective as possible. But then you can put it back into context and you're allowed to be emotional and human about the way you engage with it.

Of course I have other interests, but on the other hand, science is a lifestyle in the sense that it's a combination of profession and hobby.

At school, my favorite subjects were history, biology, chemistry, and physics. Especially the teaching in physics was excellent. Most of my understanding of it I got at high school, not at the university.

Endnotes, often confused with footnotes that live at the bottom of a page, is that lump of text at the end of the book, sometimes even relegated to a tiny font size. They're often forgotten but, in nonfiction, particularly history books, can offer a fascinating footprint into the author's research, a joyful, geeky abyss.

I believe in science. We're going to bring back science to the state of Wisconsin.

People have asked me whether I have a science background. No, but I have a great curiosity about the kinds of things we do on 'Discover.'