Useful and In teresting Quotes about Science, Scientists and Other Signifcant Figures
“The coincidence of such distinguished men of religion as Zwingli, Luther, Calvin, Knox, Melanchthon and Beza; of such dramatic and lyric poets as Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson; of such scientists as Boyle, Wren, Wallis, Hooke, Newton, Halley and Flamsteed cannot readily be attributed to the chance concurrence of individuals biologically endowed with predispositions toward special fields of activity. The more plausible explanation is to be found in the combination of sociological circumstances of moral, religious, aesthetic, economic and political conditions, which tended to focus the geniuses of the age upon specific spheres of endeavour. A special talent can rarely find expression when the world will have none of it.” Robert Merton, Science Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, page 5
“In his very person he was the great Janus-like symbol for the dual nature of modern science – its capacity for good and evil, its genius for the finding of truth and for lying to protect the truth discovered, its transcendent unworldly quality, free from the lust of possession, and its hoarding of secrets….The polarities of his nature are paralleled in the ambiguous nature of science itself.”
Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, page 392
“Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century. The Italian Renaissance, though not medieval, is not modern; it is more akin to the best age of Greece. The sixteenth century, with its absorption in theology, is more medieval than the world of Machiavelli. The modern world, so far as mental outlook is concerned, begins in the seventeenth century. No Italian of the Renaissance would have been unintelligible to Plato or Aristotle; Luther would have horrified Thomas Aquinas, but would not have been difficult for him to understand. With the seventeenth century it is different; Plato or Aristotle, Aquinas and Occam, could not have made head or tail of Newton.”
“Four great men – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton – are pre-eminent in the creation of science.”
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, page 512
“The substantial and persistent development of science occurs only in societies of a certain kind, which provide both cultural and material conditions for that development. This becomes particularly evident in the early days of modern science before it was established as a major institution with its own, presumably manifest, value.”
Merton, op cit, page xix
The science of external things will not console me for ignorance of ethics in times of affliction; but the science of morals will always console me for ignorance of external sciences.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, (67)