TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Environmental extremists ... wouldn�t let you build a house unless it looked like a bird�s nest.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index F > Category: Findings

Findings Quotes (6 quotes)

A recognized fact which goes back to the earliest times is that every living organism is not the sum of a multitude of unitary processes, but is, by virtue of interrelationships and of higher and lower levels of control, an unbroken unity. When research, in the efforts of bringing understanding, as a rule examines isolated processes and studies them, these must of necessity be removed from their context. In general, viewed biologically, this experimental separation involves a sacrifice. In fact, quantitative findings of any material and energy changes preserve their full context only through their being seen and understood as parts of a natural order.
First sentence of 'The Central Control of the Activity of Internal Organs', Nobel Lecture (12 Dec Dec 1949).
Science quotes on:  |  Biological (137)  |  Change (639)  |  Context (31)  |  Control (182)  |  Energy (373)  |  Examine (84)  |  Experiment (736)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Isolate (24)  |  Life (1870)  |  Material (366)  |  Multitude (50)  |  Natural Order (6)  |  Organism (231)  |  Process (439)  |  Quantitative (31)  |  Research (753)  |  Sacrifice (58)  |  Separation (60)  |  Study (701)  |  Sum (103)  |  Understand (648)  |  Unitary (3)  |  Unity (81)

All scientific theories are provisional and may be changed, but ... on the whole, they are accepted from Washington to Moscow because of their practical success. Where religion has opposed the findings of science, it has almost always had to retreat.
Essay 'Science Will Never Give Us the Answers to All Our Questions', collected in Henry Margenau, and Roy Abraham Varghese (eds.), Cosmos, Bios, Theos (1992), 65.
Science quotes on:  |  Accept (198)  |  Accepted (6)  |  Change (639)  |  Moscow (5)  |  Opposed (3)  |  Practical (225)  |  Provisional (7)  |  Religion (369)  |  Retreat (13)  |  Science And Religion (337)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Scientific Theory (24)  |  Success (327)  |  Theory (1015)  |  Washington (7)  |  Whole (756)

All scientists must focus closely on limited targets. Whether or not one’s findings on a limited subject will have wide applicability depends to some extent on chance, but biologists of superior ability repeatedly focus on questions the answers to which either have wide ramifications or lead to new areas of investigation. One procedure that can be effective is to attempt both reduction and synthesis; that is, direct a question at a phenomenon on one integrative level, identify its mechanism at a simpler level, then extrapolate its consequences to a more complex level of integration.
In 'Scientific innovation and creativity: a zoologist’s point of view', American Zoologist (1982), 22, 230-231,
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (162)  |  Answer (389)  |  Applicability (7)  |  Area (33)  |  Attempt (266)  |  Biologist (70)  |  Both (496)  |  Chance (244)  |  Closely (12)  |  Complex (202)  |  Consequence (220)  |  Depend (238)  |  Direct (228)  |  Effective (68)  |  Extent (142)  |  Extrapolate (3)  |  Focus (36)  |  Identify (13)  |  Integration (21)  |  Integrative (2)  |  Investigation (250)  |  Lead (391)  |  Level (69)  |  Limit (294)  |  Limited (102)  |  Mechanism (102)  |  More (2558)  |  Must (1525)  |  New (1273)  |  Phenomenon (334)  |  Procedure (48)  |  Question (649)  |  Ramification (8)  |  Reduction (52)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Simple (426)  |  Subject (543)  |  Superior (88)  |  Synthesis (58)  |  Target (13)  |  Wide (97)  |  Will (2350)

Science differs from politics or religion, in precisely this one discipline: we agree in advance to simply reject our own findings when they have been shown to be in error.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Advance (298)  |  Agree (31)  |  Differ (88)  |  Discipline (85)  |  Error (339)  |  Politics (122)  |  Precisely (93)  |  Reject (67)  |  Religion (369)  |  Show (353)  |  Simply (53)

Scientific inquiry would thus he conceived of as analogous to terrestrial exploration, whose product—geography—yields results of continually smaller significance which fill in ever more minute gaps in our information. In such a view, later investigations yield findings of ever smaller importance, with each successive accretion making a relatively smaller contribution to what has already come to hand. The advance of science leads, step by diminished step, toward a fixed and final view of things.
In The Limits Of Science (1984, Rev. 1999), 67.
Science quotes on:  |  Accretion (5)  |  Advance (298)  |  Already (226)  |  Contribution (93)  |  Exploration (161)  |  Fill (67)  |  Final (121)  |  Gap (36)  |  Geography (39)  |  Importance (299)  |  Information (173)  |  Inquiry (88)  |  Investigation (250)  |  Lead (391)  |  Making (300)  |  Minute (129)  |  More (2558)  |  Product (166)  |  Result (700)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Significance (114)  |  Small (489)  |  Step (234)  |  Successive (73)  |  Terrestrial (62)  |  Thing (1914)  |  View (496)  |  Yield (86)

What matters in science is the body of findings and generalizations available today: a time-defined cross-section of the process of scientific discovery. I see the advance of science as self-erasing in the sense that only those elements survive that have become part of the active body of knowledge.
In A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube (1985), 123.
Science quotes on:  |  Active (80)  |  Advance (298)  |  Available (80)  |  Become (821)  |  Body (557)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Element (322)  |  Erase (7)  |  Generalization (61)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Matter (821)  |  Process (439)  |  Scientific (955)  |  See (1094)  |  Self (268)  |  Sense (785)  |  Survive (87)  |  Time (1911)  |  Today (321)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.