Scientific Optimism Quotes

Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can't-afford-it attitude.

Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.

The general public has long been divided into two parts those who think science can do anything, and those who are afraid it will.

Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.

There's a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It's kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don't know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.

In the 1970s, I think that there was probably a higher degree of respect for science, of hope about the future, and the future-oriented vision.

My experience in science has always been that the future always exceeds what we believe is possible. I suspect that we will explore the universe.

The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few, and the damnation of almost everybody.

I love science, and I believe in it. I have a faith that science can solve problems and make the world a better place.

But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing — a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.

I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.

The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting. Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together: the digital computer and the space satellite.

On any Tuesday morning, if asked, a good working scientist will tell you with some self-satisfaction that the affairs of his field are nicely in order, that things are finally looking clear and making sense, and all is well. But come back again on another Tuesday, and the roof may have just fallen in on his life's work.

For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be: "We must know - we will know!"