E. O. Wilson Quotes

Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.

Every science has been an outcast.

The word scientist was coined in 1834, as the sciences were becoming professionalized and specialized

Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.

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

Despite all the advancements in science, and all things about religion that are disproved it still marches on. The bottom line is that the only real, absolutely provable answers about life and our place in the universe are provided by science, and religion has been holding down science since day one.

Knowing how contented, free, and joyful is life in the world of science, one fervently wishes that many would enter its portals.

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

The supernatural is only the natural of which the laws are not yet understood.

With no specific procedure, man arrived at sweeping conclusions about the universe that have proven to be true.

Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.

The history of science should not be an instrument to defend any kind of social or philosophic theory; it should be used only for its own purpose, to illustrate impartially the working of reason against unreason, the gradual unfolding of truth, in all its forms, whether pleasant or unpleasant, useful of useless, welcome or unwelcome.

In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up.

An experiment disproving a prediction is discovery.

No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power.

Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.

I think that the issues we have with science these days are not restricted to what's happening with respect to religion. There are a lot of very religious scientists around.

These are people from everywhere, from Lawrence Livermore and JPL and Sandia National Labs, the FBI, all over the place, real scientists who see what we're doing, and they consistently thank us. "I agree your results aren't always right," they'll say, "but your methods are clearly showing that science is a re-creative process, and it's an interesting process because it's messy, and no other shows show that."

A man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science.

All science is concerned with the relationship of cause and effect. Each scientific discovery increases man's ability to predict the consequences of his actions and thus his ability to control future events.

Scientists generally, not just evolutionary biologists, don't take much for granted.

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him. ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.

A scientist's life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown, the problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a matter of civil war; even though of different opinions, or of different political leanings, scientists dispute each other, they compete, but they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith "in the validity of Maxwell's or Boltzmann's equations," and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA.

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.