Ann Makosinski Quotes

I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.

The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.

Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.

I always treated the science thing and the art thing as quite similar thematically.

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

If I just did music, I might go insane. I need words; I need stories. And it's the same the other way around.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.

It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.

I have degrees in social science, math and physics. Everything but business.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

I have always loved science, but I have always loved the arts - drawing, painting and, yes, writing - more.

Art and science have their meeting point in method.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.

A creation needs not only subjectivity, but also objectivity.

I had a good experience in college, but I don't think interdisciplinary education is something that's stressed very much at all. It's generally considered to be something of a bad idea.

I don't view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method. I'm constantly looking at what's the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I'm interested in solving.

There are no enemies in science, professor. Only phenomena to study.

I think the main lesson that I have learned is that a good scientist is a humble scientist who is open-minded to listen to other scientists when they discover something.

I don't know whether it is important to study science at a young age, though current thinking emphasises the need.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

The essence of scientific genius is to question what the rest of us take for granted.

In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.