Natural Science Quotes

“Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).

. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)”
― Alan Sokal

“In the natural sciences, and particularly in chemistry, generalities must come after the detailed knowledge of each fact and not before it.”
― Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac

“Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.”
― Edgar Douglas Adrian

“The senses give both us and the animals access to the natural world, but we humans have superimposed a second world by internalizing a poem, thereby making the two worlds seem equally inescapable. Outside of the natural sciences, reason works within the second world, following paths that the imagination has cleared. But inside those sciences, nature itself shows the way,”
― Rorty Richard

“The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.”
― Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

“Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; is analogy,—the relation of resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed, either for popular use, or for new speculative improvements.”
― Humphry Davy

“Contact with secular and Christian ways of thinking increased Spinoza’s dissatisfaction with the biblical interpretations he received from the rabbis, who in turn frowned on his interest in natural science, and on his study of the pernicious Latin language, in which so much heresy and blasphemy had been so engagingly expressed.”
― Roger Scruton, Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction

“Jedes Volk, das sich an einer von der europäischen Naturwissenschaft festgesetzten Notenskala messen lässt, steht immer als Kulturverbund höherer Affen da.
Das Notengeben ist sinnlos. Jeder Versuch, die Kulturen nebeneinander zu stellen, um zu bestimmen, welche davon am höchsten entwickelt ist, führt immer nur dazu, daß die westliche Kultur noch einen weiteren beschissenen Versuch unternimmt, den Haß auf ihren eigenen Schatten auf andere zu projizieren.
Es gibt nur eine Art und Weise, eine andere Kultur zu verstehen. Sie zu _leben_. In sie einzuziehen, darum zu bitten, als Gast geduldet zu werden, die Sprache zu lernen. Irgendwann kommt dann vielleicht das Verständnis. Es wird dann immer wortlos sein. In dem Moment, in dem man das Fremde begreift, verliert man den Drang, es zu erklären. Ein Phänomen erklären heißt, sich davon zu entfernen. Wen ich anfange, mit mir selber oder anderen von Qaanaaq zu reden, habe ich fast wieder verloren, was nie richtig mein gewesen ist.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“Astronomy is, not without reason, regarded, by mankind, as the sublimest of the natural sciences. Its objects so frequently visible, and therefore familiar, being always remote and inaccessible, do not lose their dignity.”
― Benjamin Silliman, Elements of chemistry: in the order of the lectures given in Yale College. Volume 2 of 2

“Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means.”
― Charles Lapworth

“White clouds, blue sky.”
― Laiah Gifty Akita

“Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“What is most remarkable about the philosophy of Kant, in my opinion, is the wide range of topics on which his thoughts repay careful study. In so many areas -- not only in metaphysics but also in natural science, history, morality, and critique of taste -- he seems to have gone to the root of the matter, and at least raised for us the fundamental issues, whether or not we decide in the end that what he said about them is correct. In his brief, five-page essay on the question "What is Enlightenment?" for example, he locates the essence of enlightenment not in learning or the cultivation of our intellectual powers but in the courage and resolve to think for oneself, to emancipate oneself from tradition, prejudice, and every form of authority that offers us the comfort and security of letting someone else do our thinking for us. Kant's essay enables us to see that the issues raised by the challenge of the Enlightenment are still just as much with us as they were in the eighteenth century.”
― Allen W. Wood, Kant

“La ciencia es contraria a la sensibilidad de los animales hasta que ésta ya no pueda negarse. ¿No sería mejor argumentar, por si acaso, lo contrario, para no maltratar innecesariamente a los animales?”
― Peter Wohlleben, La vida interior de los animales

“A shadow does not need the object to which it belongs to move for it to move.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“In social science, in contrast to natural science, it seems that by the time one goes in search of empirical evidence, a favored theory has already been chosen, and evidence is being gathered not in order to test it but in order to confirm it.”
― Lee McIntyre, Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior

“It is no easy task to gain some understanding of human affairs. In some respects, the task is harder than in the natural sciences. Mother nature doesn't provide the answers on a silver platter, but at least she does not go out of her way to set up barriers to understanding. In human affairs, such barriers are the norm. It is necessary to dismantle the structures of deception erected by doctrinal systems which adopt a range of devices that flow very naturally from the ways in which power is concentrated.”
― Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

“Nature is natural science; scientists turn that into the artificial and biological process.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“When it is really natural science that speaks, we listen willingly and as disciples. But the language of the natural scientists is not always that of natural science itself, and is assuredly not so when they speak of "natural philosophy" and the "theory of knowledge of natural science.”
― Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology

“Att världen är oerhört väl inrättad för att inte minst liv skall uppkomma verkar stå utom allt tvivel. Men hur kan detta vara möjligt om världen i minsta detalj är entydigt bestämds av matematisk nödvändighet? Varför skulle matematiken bry sig om att frambringa en levande värld? Är det inte troligare att matematiken i stället tillåter flera olika möjligheter och att den antropiska principen sedan gör resten?”
― Ulf Danielsson, Stjärnor och äpplen som faller: En bok om upptäckter och märkvärdigheter i universum