Science Requires Quotes (6 quotes)
All science requires mathematics.
[Editors' summary of Bacon's idea, not Bacon's wording.]
[Editors' summary of Bacon's idea, not Bacon's wording.]
These are not the exact words of Roger Bacon, but are from an editor's sub-heading, giving a summary for the topic of Chapter 2, for example, in Roger Bacon and Robert Belle Burke (ed.), Opus Maius (reproduction 2002), Vol. 1, Part 4, 117. Part 4 is devoted to a discourse on Mathematics. In its Chapter 1, as translated, Bacon states that 'There are four great sciences, without which the other sciences cannot be known nor a knowledge of things secured. ... Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics.'
Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom—that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.
As quoted, without citation, in Harold Eves, Mathematical Circles Squared (1971). Collected in Bill Swainson, The Encarta Book of Quotations (2000), 361.
Science requires an almost complete openness to all ideas. On the other hand, it requires the most rigorous and uncompromising skepticism.
In article, 'Wonder and Skepticism', Skeptical Inquirer (Jan/Feb 1995), 19, No. 1.
Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.
In The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (1998), 54.
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
In Time Enough For Love: the Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 366.
The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task.
…...
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) -- 
