Theoretical Science Quotes

The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them.

But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.

So far I have been speaking of theoretical science, which is an attempt to understand the world. Practical science, which is an attempt to change the world, has been important from the first, and has continually increased in importance, until it has almost ousted theoretical science from men's thoughts.

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.

Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.

Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings.

Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

The research I have been doing - studying how foodstuffs yield energy in living cells - does not lead to the kind of knowledge that can be expected to give immediate practical benefits to mankind. If I have chosen this field of study, it was because I believed in its importance in spite of its theoretical character.

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.

The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to philosophers is very recent.

Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.

I am fascinated by quantum physics.

My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science.

You know what I'm intrigued by? Like, space and wormholes and Stephen Hawking's theories and Richard Dawkins's theories. That's what I care about.

I'm a science fiction author at heart, and what I like about the Cthulhu Mythos setting is that, at its core, it is horror science fiction. I can take ideas from modern theoretical science, manipulate them in truly bizarre and weird ways, and remain true to the Cthulhu Mythos vision.

Economics is a theoretical science and as such abstains from any judgement of value. It is not its task to tell people what ends they should aim at. It is a science of the means to be applied for attainment of ends chosen, not, to be sure, a science of the choosing of ends. Ultimate decisions, the valuations and the choosing of ends, are beyond the scope of any science. Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.

What I do is very theoretical. It won't necessarily have implications for anything anyone is doing tomorrow, yet you know that there's a sense of progress in science, and as we understand more, it just turns out that, somehow, the world evolves with us.

Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.