Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.

Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right?

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

From all this it follows what the general character of the problem of the development of a body of scientific knowledge is, in so far as it depends on elements internal to science itself.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

I've lost my faith in science.

I feel like every time a door is opened by science, suddenly there are a hundred doors that need to get opened. That's what makes it an everlasting, interesting experience to go through.

Scientists tend to build a reputation on refuting the theories of those who have gone before. Yet, whatever we hypothesize, observe, measure or record about the natural world, it leaves more unanswered questions.

Every science has been an outcast.

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.

To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

As a number of people have stressed over the years, I think it would be premature to assume science itself will explain everything.

We often say that our science is objective and accurate, but we don't often say that our science is incomplete - that although the established parts of natural science are very well tested and the evidence makes a compelling case for things being as they've been described, there nevertheless are open questions that we cannot answer.

I believe in science. We're going to bring back science to the state of Wisconsin.

The scientist is not much given to talking of the riddle of the universe. "Riddle" is not a scientific term. The conception of a riddle is "something which can he solved." And hence the scientist does not use that popular phrase. We don't know the why of anything. On that matter we are no further advanced than was the cavedweller. The scientist is contented if he can contribute something toward the knowledge of what is and how it is.

When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.

Again there is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress; which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

It's high time to rescue "intelligent design" from the politics of religion. There are too many riddles not yet answered by either biology or the Bible, and by asking them honestly, without foregone conclusions, science could take a huge leap forward.

In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years - are still in their very earliest stages.

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge.

I think our science is a marvelous tool. Of course it has its politics, its failings, its mistakes, like all other human endeavors, but I think the methodology of our science - using it to postulate and to use the proper approach of creating falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them to see if they ring true, and then progressing by finding the anomalies to our theoretical structure, and then improving our theoretical structure to take care and test the anomalies - is the way to go, because that helps us discover what the universe.is all about and our relationship to it.

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, It is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.