Noam Chomsky Quotes

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

Great scientific contributions have been techniques.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

With science, there is this culture of experimentation, and most of the time, those experiments fail.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.

There's no term to the work of a scientist.

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied research; to me, it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature.

Science is what scientists do.

Scientific innovations continually provide us with new means of analyzing the finds.

Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.

Information is the resolution of uncertainty.

I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.

Real science is a very risky activity; people can spend their whole life working on a theory that doesn’t work out.

if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

Science is not the glamour that's portrayed in films. It's a lot of drudgery work, along with the wonderfully exciting periods when you discover something.

Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.

Pursue science because it is knowledge, because it broadens our horizons. There is so much more to be discovered.

I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.

I always looked at myself as a physicist learning new tricks by looking at nature.

Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.

...It would be possible to make much more progress than has been made if the NCI knew its job better, knew how to make discoveries...The NCI really does not know how to make discoveries....So long as the NCI is not willing to follow up ideas that seem good to people who have had experience making discoveries, the work of the NCI is going to be pedestrian.

But it is just this characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered which it would be fallacious to generalize, for it is obvious that simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can, therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered laws are equally simple.