Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist.

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.

From the dawn of history, science has probed the universe of unknowns, searching for the uniting laws of nature.

There is nothing inherently wrong about science.

Science is about unravelling nature.

Science is the ultimate tool to reveal the laws of nature, and the one word written on its banner is Truth.

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. ... Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

It must be for truth's sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty.

I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.

Whether one sees the world as God's creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito.

The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature.

Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.'

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

In science one must search for ideas. If there are no ideas, there is no science. A knowledge of facts is only valuable in so far as facts conceal ideas: facts without ideas are just the sweepings of the brain and the memory.

Science is the poetry of reality.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical purpose, and, I daresay, an aesthetic purpose.

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.