Gallery
Philosophy of Science
What is science?
The following words, by Whitehead, may be considered as a close answer to that question:
“the attempt to frame in a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.”
Alfred N. Whitehead
“In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period.”
Erwin Schrödinger
“Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every great advance in science.”
James Clerk Maxwell
“Science, good science, creates as much ignorance as it does knowledge.”
Stuart Firestein
“Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.”
Robert Merton
“Symmetry has become the dominant theme in fundamental physics. Elementary-particle physics is singularly Platonic in this respect.”
John D. Barrow
“The search for a Theory of Everything is the search for a universal trivialization---a universal ‘nothing but’.”
Gian-Carlo Rota
“The great Arthur Eddington gave a lecture about his alleged derivation of the fine structure constant from fundamental theory. Goudsmit and Kramers were both in the audience. Goudsmit understood little but recognised it as far fetched nonsense. After the discusion, Goudsmit went to his friend and mentor Kramers and asked him, ‘Do all physicists go off on crazy tangents when they grow old? I am afraid.’ Kramers answered ‘No Sam, you don't have to be scared. A genius like Eddington may perhaps go nuts but a fellow like you just gets dumber and dumber.’”
Max Dresden
“What is the purpose of science if it cannot incorporate some of the most basic aspects of human experience?… the role of evolution, of events, in our description of nature is steadily increasing. How then can we maintain a time-reversible view of physics?”
Ilya Prigogine (The end of certainty)
“Persisten interactions mean that we can not take a part of the system and consider it in isolation. It is at this global level,..., that the symmetry between past and future is broken, and science can recognize the flow of time. ”
Ilya Prigogine (The end of certainty)
Some of the linked sites here may not be related to science at all, but I think they are interesting anyway
Millikan’s Nobel Lecture