Francis Bacon Quotes

Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before.

Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

The advancement of all sciences, especially where there has been such a radical change, have been attended with persecution.

In science, it is rare that a transformational change occurs during our lifetimes.

Although scientists can often be as resistant to new ideas as anyone, the process of science ensures that, over time, good ideas and theories prevail.

Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.

Science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted.

There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.

The development of the telescope, together with increased knowledge of things, brought men to see that the earth is not what man had once thought it to be.

The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.

Science moves fastest when there's plenty of debate and controversy.

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Science is the first expression of punk, because it doesn't advance without challenging authority. It doesn't make progress without tearing down what was there before and building upon the structure.

The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.

Mainstream science starts as heresy.

Modern civilization depends on science …

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.

The term science means something quite different for our generation than it did not so many generations ago.

Copernicanism and other essential ingredients of modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.

Sciences usually advances by a succession of small steps, through a fog in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts, an eminence is gained, and a wider stretch of territory can be surveyed-sometimes with startling results. A whole science may then seem to undergo a kaleidoscopic rearrangement, fragments of knowledge sometimes being found to fit together in a hitherto unsuspected manner. Sometimes the shock of readjustment may spread to other sciences; sometimes it may divert the whole current of human thought.