Serge Lang Quotes

Early on, when you're working in a new area of science, you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn't, and, even worse, leading others to believe it.

Science has become politicized, and that's an embarrassment.

I object to a legal approach when settling questions of science or scientific behavior.

I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don't understand how science works. That's what I claim. And if they did, they'd be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless.

But whereas skepticism and uncertainty have always been the heart and soul of science, confidence and certainty are the coin of the realm in much of today’s public discourse. Unquestioning confidence is deeply troubling for the scientific community because it is not the currency we trade in, and it has led people in America and around the world to question scientific enterprise itself. We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

Some of the FDA's own scientists have charged that politics, not science, is behind the FDA's actions.

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

What standards are upheld by the scientific community affect the community internally, and also affect its relations with society at large, including Congress.

Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.

We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

Anything that makes us take more seriously scientists - or economists or chemists or physicists or biologists - I think is helpful in times when things get distorted because of people not paying attention to all the facts.

Debunking bad science should be constant obligation of the science community, even if it takes time away from serious research or seems to be a losing battle. One takes comfort from the fact there is no Gresham's laws in science. In the long run, good science drives out bad.

The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.

Scientific method isn't about winning popularity contests. It's also not about being with the majority opinion. It isn't supposed be determined by politics. It is about attempting to limit bias or prejudice in the results

When people don’t like the results that they are getting from honest scientific research, they try and discredit the researchers and the methods..

To the scientist, failure to flip-flop in the face of contradictory evidence is irrational and dangerous behavior. And scientists will often flip-flop at almost light speed. Often it takes only a single observation to flip-flop thousands of scientifically learned people.

I'm comfortable reading science and dissecting it and discerning the difference between junk science and real science.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien hypotheses should always be a last resort.

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense.

It is always observable that the physical and the exact sciences are the last to suffer under despotisms.

Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.

Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.

Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.