Hannes Alfven Quotes

To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.

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

I think that we scientists are seeking an understanding of the natural world. We come in various types - chemists and physicists and biologists and such - and we all have the same goal. We are making progress.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

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

I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.

When science has sent forth her fiat - it is only to hear and obey.

There is nothing inherently wrong about science.

The Scientific Revolution, that remarkable transformation of European thought that occurred between approximately 1550 and 1700, brought with it an ascendancy of the experimental method and the refusal to believe any explanation of natural phenomena that could not be proven to the satisfaction of the empirical observer.

The methods and tools of science perennially breach barriers, granting me confidence that our epic march of insight into the operations of nature will continue without end.

If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.

We could live at the present day without a Plato, but a double number of Newtons is required to discover the secrets of nature, and to bring life into harmony with the laws of nature.

Science is really about describing the way the universe works in one aspect or another in all branches of science—how a life-form works, how this works, how that works. ... You have to have a natural curiosity for that.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty.

I love science and that time in history when science and the humanities were the same thing.

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

There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds.

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.

I really didn't like the academic structure of science, but I realized I loved science and missed science.

As a scientist, of course, we have to believe there is no supernatural. There are only natural entities in the universe. And those are the things that we study as natural scientists.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.