imagination in science Quotes

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics.

The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ... They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know.

Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.

One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm . . . the realm of the imagination guides my thinking.

It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecutionof science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.

The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

Alan Rocke's Image and Reality does so many things vividly and convincingly: it shows how visual images led chemistry step by step to the reality of the microscopic world; how simple portrayals of the logic of substitution and combination were reified; brings to our attention the imaginative, neglected work of Williamson and Kopp; and takes a critical look at Kekule's daydream. And it beautifully delineates the essential place the imagination has in science. A rewarding, lively picture of chemistry in formation.

There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.

It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.