Quotes for and from skeptics

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An idea is something you have;
an ideology is something that has you."
Morris Berman
 

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have
proudly taught to others, and which they have woven,
thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
Tolstoy

 

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather
because its opponents eventually die and a new
generation grows up that is familiar with it."
M. Planck

"Science is not formal logic–it needs the free play of the mind in as great a degree as any other creative art. It is true that this is a gift which can hardly be taught, but its growth can be encouraged in those who already posses it."
Max Born (1882-1970) German Physicist.
Nobel Prize, 1954.

"There ain't no rules around here!
We're trying to accomplish something!"
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

"The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas
but the march of events..."
John Kenneth Galbraith

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing
that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull,
but also just stupid."
J. D. Watson _The Double Helix

"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

  "It's like religion. Heresy in science is thought of
as a bad thing, whereas it should be
just the opposite."
 T. Gold

"There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture
out of such trifling investment of fact."
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories
instead of theories to suit facts." 
Sherlock Holmes

"There is no adequate defense, except stupidity,
against the impact of a new idea."
Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961)
U. S. physicist, Nobel Prize, 1946

"I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science,
with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle
and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind
 us as we proceed."
Max Born (1882-1970) German Physicist.
Nobel Prize, 1954.

"It is not as uncommon for engineers to accept
the reality of phenomena that are not yet
understood, as it is very common for physicists to
disbelieve the reality of phenomena that seem to
contradict contemporary beliefs of physics "
-H. Bauer

"If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it."
Wilbur Wright, 1902
 

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent
with the laws of nature."
Michael Faraday

"...man will occasionally stumble over the truth,
but usually manages to pick himself up,
walk over or around it, and carry on."
Winston S. Churchill

"I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here ...
We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the
 last few years, and it is time it should be stopped."
 U.S. Senator Simon Cameron,
on the Smithsonian Institute (1901)

"In questions of science the authority of a thousand
is not worth the humble reasoning of
a single individual."
Galileo Galilei

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas.
If your ideas are that good, you'll have to ram
 them down people's throats." 
- Howard Aiken

"He who never walks save where he sees men's tracks
makes no discoveries."
J.G. Holland

"Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explosives, but it is unlikely to produce
anything very much more dangerous."
Winston Churchill (1939)

 

"That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done ...
The bomb will never go off, and I speak as
an expert in explosives." -
U.S. Admiral William D. Leahy
to President Truman, on atomic weaponry (1945)

 

"I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here ...
We have spent millions in that sort of
 thing for the last few years, and it is time
it should be stopped."
U.S. Senator Simon Cameron,
on the Smithsonian Institute (1901)

 

"I watched his countenance closely, to see if
he was not deranged ... and I was assured
by other senators after he left the room
that they had no confidence in it."
U.S. Senator Smith of Indiana,
after witnessing a demonstration of
Samuel Morses's telegraph (1842)

"X-rays are a hoax."
Lord Kelvin, engineer and physicist (c. 1900)

"... too far-fetched to be considered." -
The editor of Scientific American, in a letter to
Robert Goddard about Goddard's idea of a
rocket-accelerated airplane bomb (1940)

 

"They never will try to steal the phonograph.
It is not of any commercial value."
Thomas Edison (c. 1915)

 

"Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize
it as a conspicuous failure."
Henry Morton, on Edison's incandescent lamp (c.1880)

 

"I must confess that my imagination, in spite even
of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine
doing anything but suffocating its crew
and floundering at sea." 
H.G. Wells, Anticipations (1901)

"People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to
show that the earth revolves, not the heavens of the
firmament, the sun and the moon ... This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred
Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded
the sun to stand still, not the earth."
Martin Luther, about 1540, in Table Talk.
 

"The view that the sun stands motionless at the center
of the universe is foolish, philosophically false,
utterly heretical, because contrary to Holy Scripture.
The view that the earth is not the center of the universe
and even has a daily rotation is philosophically false,
and at least an erroneous belief."
Holy Office, Roman Catholic Church,
edict of March 5, 1616.

 

"The multitude of books is a great evil.
There is no limit to this fever for writing;
every one must be an author; some out of vanity,
to acquire celebrity and raise up a name,
others for the sake of mere gain."
Martin Luther (1483-1546), Table Talk.

 

"Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human
voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on
these absurd and deliberately misleading statements,
the misguided public ... has been persuaded to
purchase stock in his company ..."
 U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor
Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently for his
Radio Telephone Company (1913)

 "It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." 
-Robert Goddard

"The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich
his science by the addition of a new idea." 
Max Planck

 "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, 
doesn't go away."
Phillip K. Dick

 "There are children playing in the street who could solve
some of my top problems in physics, because they
have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."
Robert Oppenheimer

 "The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively not by
the false appearance of things present and which mislead i
nto error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice."
Schopenhauer

 "Who never walks save where he sees men's tracks
makes no discoveries."
J.G. Holland

 "When I examined myself and my methods of thought,
I came to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge."
Albert Einstein

  "The most erroneous stories are those we think
we know best -- and therefore never
scrutinize or question."
Stephen Jay Gould

There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism."
Nietzche

"The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea." 
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

 "One thing I have learned in a long life: that all
our science, measured against reality,
is primitive and childlike  and yet it is the
most precious thing we have."
Einstein

 "I love fools' experiments, I am always making them."
Darwin 

"The whole of science consists of data that, at one time 
or another, were inexplicable." 
B. O'Regan

 "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke, or worried to
death by a frown on the right person's brow."
Charles Brower

 "The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It is this sudden confrontation with the depth
and scope of ignorance that represents the most
significant contribution of twentieth-century science
to the human intellect." 
- Lewis Thomas

 "Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of
the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted
to the narrowness of the mind" 
 Francis Bacon

"Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is
an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality
at the end of it - and I see no difference between a
scientist developing a marvelous discovery and
an artist making a painting." 
C. Rubbia, Nobelist and director of CERN 

 "You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back." 
Beverly Rubik

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that
something is possible, he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something is impossible,
he is very probably wrong."  
Arthur C. Clarke's First Law

"It is through science that we prove,
but through intuition that we discover."
H. Poincare

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing
its opponents and making them see the light,
but rather because its opponents eventually die
and a new generation grows up that is
familiar with it."
M. Planck

"Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has
 yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought,
about that which everybody sees."
Erwin Schrödinger 1887-1961

"Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations,
one can claim to have an 'elegant' or 'robust' theory.
But it isn't science."
Halton Arp

Science advances funeral by funeral.

"A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds."
M. Twain

Never attribute to conspiracy that which is
adequately explained by stupidity.

"I never make predictions, especially about the future."
Casey Stengle

"Man won't fly for a thousand years."
 Wilbur Wright, (1901)

"What, sir? You would make a ship sail against
the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire
under her decks? I pray you excuse me.
I have no time to listen to such nonsense."
Napoleon Bonaparte to Robert Fulton,
upon hearing of the latter's plans for
a steam-powered engine.


"I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation
other than ballooning."
Lord Kelvin, engineer and physicist (c. 1890)

"In all fairness to those who by training are not prepared to evaluate the fundamental difficulties of going from
one planet to another, or even from the earth to the
moon, it must be stated that there is not the
slightest possibility of such journeys."
F.R. Moulton, American astronomer (1935)

 

"The Panama Canal is actually a thing of the past,
and Nature in her works will soon obliterate all traces
of French energy and money expended on the Isthmus."
Scientific American (1981)
 

A committee, organized to study Columbus' plan to sail
west to discover a shorter route to the Indies, reporting
to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain
in 1486 that the trip was impossible because

1. A voyage to Asia would require three years
2. The Western Ocean is infinite and perhaps unnavigable.
3. If he reached the Antipodes [the land on the other side of the globe from Europe] he could not get back.
4. There are no Antipodes because the greater part of the globe is covered with water,
and because Saint Augustine says so ...
5. Of five zones, only three are habitable.
6. So many centuries after the Creation it was unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value.

 

"Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with
which man will never be able to cope."
Simon Newcomb, American astronomer (1903)

 

"If God had intended that man should fly,
he would have given him wings."
George W. Melville, chief engineer of the
U.S. Navy (c. 1900)

"A web of naked fancies." - A critic's reaction to
the publication of physicist George Simon Ohm's
theory of electricity (Ohm's law) in 1827

"Science, it would seem, is not sexless;
she is a man, a father, and infected too."
Virginia Woolf, 'Three Guineas', 1938

We hold these postulates to be intuitively obvious, that all physicists are born equal, to a first approximation, and are endowed by their creator with certain discrete privileges, among them a mean rest life, n degrees of freedom, and the following rights which are invariant under all linear transformations:

1. To approximate all problems to ideal cases.

2. To use order of magnitude calculations whenever deemed necessary (i.e. whenever one can get away
with it).

3. To use the rigorous method of "squinting" for solving problems more complex than the addition of positive real integers.

4. To dismiss all functions which diverge as "nasty" and "unphysical."

5. To invoke the uncertainty principle when confronted by confused mathematicians, chemists, engineers, psychologists, dramatists, and other lower scientists.

6. When pressed by non-physicists for an explanation of (4) to mumble in a sneering tone of voice something about physically naive mathematicians.

7. To equate two sides of an equation which are dimensionally inconsistent, with a suitable comment to the effect of, "Well, we are interested in the order of magnitude anyway."

8. To the extensive use of "bastard notations" where conventional mathematics will not work.

9. To invent fictitious forces to delude the general public.

10. To justify shaky reasoning on the basis that it gives the right answer.

11. To cleverly choose convenient initial conditions, using the principle of general triviality.

12. To use plausible arguments in place of proofs, and thenceforth refer to these arguments as proofs.

13. To take on faith any principle which seems right but cannot be proved.

"New and stirring things are belittled because if they are
not belittled, the humiliating question arises,
'Why then are you not taking part in them?' "
H. G. Wells 

"I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation
of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain
kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE."
William James

"There is nothing particularly scientific about excessive caution. Science thrives on daring generalizations."
L. Hogben

 "Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain
or freed a human soul."
Mark Twain 

"A danger sign of the lapse from true skepticism into dogmatism is an inability to respect those who disagree"
Dr. Leonard George

 "Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer
than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose...
I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamed of, in any philosophy"
J.B.S. Haldane

 "The farther the experiment is from theory,
the closer it is to the Nobel Prize."
Joliet-Curie

 "Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward;
they may be defeated, but they start a winning game."
Goethe

 "As long as we do science, some things will
always remain unexplained."
Fritjof Capra

 "If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar." 
Richard Feynman

 "The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities
of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday
has become the wisdom of tomorrow."
Sir William Osler

 "Perhaps the only thing that saves science from invalid conventional wisdom that becomes effectively permanent
is the presence of mavericks in every generation -
people who keep challenging convention and thinking
up new ideas for the sheer hell of it or from
an innate contrariness." 
Dr. D. M. Raup, Paleontologist, U. Chicago.

"Never attribute to conspiracy that which is
adequately explained by stupidity."
Heinlien

 "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain 
the ability to function."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The high-minded man must care more for the truth
than for what people think."
Aristotle