#scienc

The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#awe #galaxy #science #science

Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain. ↗

— Émile Durkheim

#science

When I tell people I'm planning on majoring in psychology, I usually get one of three responses: A) Oh! Are you analyzing me right now? B) Psychology . . . hardly an exact science, is it? or C) So what's wrong with you? ↗

— Alicia Thompson

#psych-major-syndrome #science

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. ↗

— vonnegut

#science

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules. ↗

— William James

#science

The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile. ↗

— Hans Selye

#science #science

Every time a scientist publishes a good piece of work, she helps to maintain and raise the standards for what is true. We have to keep chipping away. ↗

— Deborah M. Gordon

#science

Burying your head in the sand does not make you invisible it only leads to suffocation. ↗

— Wayne Gerard Trotman

#chi-ro-jin #head #invisibility #invisible #quotable

[I]n science we have to be particularly cautious about "why" questions. When we ask, "Why?" we usually mean "How?" If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes. For example, we might ask: "Why is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?" but what we really probably mean is, "How is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?" That is, we are interested in what physical processes led to the Earth ending up in its present position. "Why" implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it. ↗

— Lawrence M. Krauss

#science

In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#science