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: “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it... That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That�s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index M > Category: Mid-Air

Mid-Air Quotes (3 quotes)

A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.
I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.
In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.
I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the “growing edge;” the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.
But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. “If I have seen further than other men,” said Isaac Newton, “it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Adding A Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science (1964), Introduction.
Science quotes on:  |  Advance (298)  |  Air (366)  |  Arise (162)  |  Beginning (312)  |  Behind (139)  |  Being (1276)  |  Belief (615)  |  Certain (557)  |  Condescension (3)  |  Count (107)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Edge (51)  |  Everything (489)  |  Exist (458)  |  Fad (10)  |  Fallacy (31)  |  First (1302)  |  Form (976)  |  Frontier (41)  |  Giant (73)  |  Grandeur (35)  |  Green (65)  |  Growing (99)  |  Halo (7)  |  Heat (180)  |  Historian (59)  |  History Of Science (80)  |  Hover (8)  |  Insight (107)  |  Leaf (73)  |  Liquid (50)  |  Man (2252)  |  Meaning (244)  |  More (2558)  |  Never (1089)  |  Newborn (5)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Number (710)  |  Other (2233)  |  Point (584)  |  Progress (492)  |  Regard (312)  |  Research (753)  |  Revolutionary (31)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Shoulder (33)  |  Sorry (31)  |  Sparkling (7)  |  Spring (140)  |  Sun (407)  |  Surely (101)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Time (1911)  |  Tree (269)  |  Trivial (59)  |  Trunk (23)  |  Twig (15)  |  Vague (50)  |  Victim (37)  |  Warmth (21)  |  Wrong (246)  |  Year (963)

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.
'Evolution as Fact and Theory', in Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983, 1994), Chap. 19.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Apple (46)  |  Certainty (180)  |  Data (162)  |  Debate (40)  |  Difference (355)  |  Different (595)  |  Do (1905)  |  Einstein (101)  |  Albert Einstein (624)  |  Explain (334)  |  Explanation (246)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Facts (553)  |  Gravitation (72)  |  Hierarchy (17)  |  Idea (881)  |  Increasing (4)  |  Interpretation (89)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Outcome (15)  |  Pending (2)  |  Rival (20)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Structure (365)  |  Suspend (11)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Theory (1015)  |  Theory Of Gravitation (6)  |  Thing (1914)  |  World (1850)

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered … Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor).
'Evolution as Fact and Theory', in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (1983), 254-255.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Ancestor (63)  |  Apple (46)  |  Argument (145)  |  Attack (86)  |  Being (1276)  |  Certainty (180)  |  Claim (154)  |  Creationist (16)  |  Data (162)  |  Debate (40)  |  Different (595)  |  Discover (571)  |  Do (1905)  |  Einstein (101)  |  Albert Einstein (624)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Explain (334)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Facts (553)  |  Favor (69)  |  Gravitation (72)  |  Hierarchy (17)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Being (185)  |  Idea (881)  |  Mechanism (102)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Other (2233)  |  Pending (2)  |  Perpetual (59)  |  Rival (20)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Structure (365)  |  Suspend (11)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Theory (1015)  |  Theory Of Gravitation (6)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Truth (1109)  |  World (1850)


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.