George Sarton Quotes

After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives?

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Scientific research involves going beyond the well-trodden and well-tested ideas and theories that form the core of scientific knowledge. During the time scientists are working things out, some results will be right, and others will be wrong. Over time, the right results will emerge.

Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

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

The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry — is not even a ”subject " — but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.

Civilization owes to the Islamic world some of its most important tools and achievements...the Muslim genius has added much to the culture of all peoples.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both.

When I was younger, I'd get very empirical with myself. "I have a hypothesis about myself. I'll put myself in a situation, see what happens, then I'll draw a conclusion based on the empirical evidence. Hypothesis: I can play basketball." So I'd try. "Conclusion: I cannot play basketball."

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

Science probes; it does not prove.

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.

Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something ? reality ? that may not be understood at all.

There is... in our day, a powerful antidote to nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times - I mean science. Science cannot be ignored or rejected, because it is bound up with modern technique; it is essential alike to prosperity in peace and to victory in war. That is, perhaps from an intellectual point of view, the most hopeful feature of our age, and the one which makes it most likely that we shall escape complete submersion in some new or old superstition.

Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.

As to science, we may well define it for our purpose as "methodical thinking directed toward finding regulative connections between our sensual experiences".

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

If it turns out that we're doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that's the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we're not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we're just trying to see what happens.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.

The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong... There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated.

The office of science is not to record possibilities; but to ascertain what nature does ... As far as Darwinism deals with mere arguments of possibilities or even probabilities, without a basis of fact, it departs from the true scientific method and injures science, as most of the devotees of the new ism have already done.