WISE WORDS: Science

Who are you gonna believe?

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We dance ‘round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows. — Robert Frost

We teach our children about math and chemistry and biology and physics, but we don’t really teach them about SCIENCE.

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We're not teaching our children "real science"

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Science is not a collection of facts. It is a very hard methodology for discovering what is true and, equally if not more important, what is NOT true.

Science and scientists have always been under attack because they threaten the dominion of belief and faith and power. Here are some wise words about all that. ⬇️

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The most successful scientist thinks like a poet — wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical — and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees. — E.O. Wilson

Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. — Atul Gawande

Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated. —  Steven Pinker

I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, rather than theories to suit facts.  — Sherlock Holmes (in A Scandal in Bohemia by A.C. Doyle)

If you have no data, you’re just another person with an opinion. — W. Edward Deming

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. ― Philip K. Dick

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. — Charles Darwin

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken

People would rather believe than know. — E.O. Wilson

A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot. — Vietnamese proverb

(People) who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations. Of necessity, they observe with a preconceived idea, and when they devise an experiment, they can see in its results only a confirmation of their theory. In this way they distort observation and often neglect very important facts because they do not further their aim. — Claude Bernard

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. — Albert Einstein

Science advances one funeral at a time. — Max Planck

What science promises, and has already supplied in part, is the following. There is a real creation story of humanity, and one only, and it is not a myth. It is being worked out and tested, and enriched and strengthened, step by step. — E.O. Wilson

(Nature) rarely replies to questions unless they are put to her in the form of experiments, to which she can say yes or no. Only those blessed with the understanding that comes from a sincere and profound love of Nature will succeed in constructing a blueprint of the many questions that need to be asked to get even an approximate answer.  — Hans Selye

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.  — E.O. Wilson

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