Science

"Some feminist cultural theorists in France, Britain, and the United States have argued that visualization and objectification as privileged ways of knowing are specifically masculine (man the viewer, woman the spectacle). Without falling into such essentialism, we may suppose that the language, perceptions, and uses of visual information may be different for women, as pregnant subjects, than they are for men (or women) as physicians, researchers, or reporters. And this difference will reflect the historical control by men over science, medicine, and obstetrics in Western society and over the historical definitions of masculinity in Western culture."

"Presentations of scientific and medical "conquests" in the mass media commonly appropriate this terrain into Cold War culture and macho style. Consider this piece of text from Life's 1965 picture story on ultrasound in pregnancy, "A Sonar 'Look' at an Unborn Baby":"

": The astonishing medical machine resting on this pregnant woman's abdomen in a Philadelphia hospital is "looking" at her unborn child in precisely the same way a Navy surface ship homes in on enemy submarines. Using the sonar principle, it is bombarding her with a beam of ultra-high-frequency sound waves that are inaudible to the human ear. Back come the echoes, bouncing off the baby's head, to show up as a visual image on a viewing screen."

"The science of fools with long memories."

"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."

"The unprecedented development of science and technology... so rapid that it is said that 90 per cent of the scientists which this country has ever produced are still living today."

"Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?"

"Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?"

"Most of us rather hastily and thoughtlessly regard “science” as a sort of collection of linear accelerators and space vehicles and organic chemistry models. In fact it is not any of these things; it is only a systematic method of gathering and testing knowledge, involving certain formal procedures: gathering information, forming a theory to explain the information, predicting certain consequences of the theory and performing an experiment to test the prediction. If you investigate any area of knowledge (whether it is stellar physics or the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin) by this method, you are doing science. If you use any other method, you are doing something else."

"There is no science apart from the general. It may even be said that the object of the exact sciences is to spare us these direct verifications."

"Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."

"There might be a serious objection to classical studies. If it is to be desired that nine out of ten Frenchmen become good merchants and business men, is it not dangerous to disgust them beforehand with that which is to fill their lives? No doubt, it would not be impossible to refute such an objection; but that is no business mine. ... I seek what must be done to form men of science. And here all is clear. The man of science ought not tarry in the realization of practical aims; these, no doubt, he will obtain, but he must obtain them over and above. ...Science has wonderful applications; but the science which would have in view only applications would no longer be science—It would be only the kitchen. There is no science but disinterested science. ... The spirit which should animate the man science is that which breathed of old on Greece and brought there to birth poets and thinkers. There remains in our classical teaching I know not what of the Greek soul; I know not what that makes us look ever upward. And that is more precious for the making of a man of science than the reading of many volumes of geometry."

"Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science... One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice. As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking."

"Without interpolation all science would be impossible."

"Now what is science? ... It is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts which appearances separate, though they are bound together by some natural and hidden kinship. Science, in other words, is a system of relations. ... It is in relations alone that objectivity must be sought. ... It is relations alone which can be regarded as objective. External objects... are really objects and not fleeting and fugitive appearances, because they are not only groups of sensations, but groups cemented by a constant bond. It is this bond, and this bond alone, which is the object in itself, and this bond is a relation."

"It is only through science and art that civilization is of value. Some have wondered at the formula: science for its own sake; and yet it is as good as life for its own sake, if life is only misery; and even as happiness for its own sake, if we do not believe that all pleasures are of the same quality... Every act should have an aim. We must suffer, we must work, we must pay for our place at the game, but this is for seeing's sake; or at the very least that others may one day see."

"To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient truths; both dispense with the necessity of reflection."

"How index-learning turns no student pale, Yet holds the eel of science by the tail."

"One science only will one genius fit, So vast is art, so narrow human wit."

"Science is, on the whole, an informal activity, a life of shirt sleeves and coffee served in beakers."

"Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative... [however] many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement. Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with."

"I don’t believe in evolution, like people believe in God … Science and technology are not advanced by people who believe, but by people who don’t know but are doing their best to find out."

"No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white."

"We should be very jealous of who speaks for science, particularly in our age of rapidly expanding technology. How can the public be educated? I do not know the specifics, but of this I am certain: The public will remain uninformed and uneducated in the sciences until the media professionals decide otherwise. Until they stop quoting charlatans and quacks and until respected scientists speak up."

"The belief that established science and scholarship-which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making-are "objective" and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture."

"Science does not aim to cover exhaustively the whole of reality, but to construct systems and concepts which will perhaps — and it is a big perhaps — allow man to act on the world."

"Science isn't structured to recognize hierarchy."

"In a fashion, at least in your time, science has as much as religion to fear from the free intellect as religion does. And (with irony) any strong combination of intellectual and intuitional abilities is not tailor-made to bring you great friends from either category. Science has, unfortunately, bound up the minds of its own most original thinkers, for they dare not stray from certain scientific principles."

"# Science is constantly, systematically and inexorably revisionary. It is a self-correcting process and one that is self-destroying of its own errors..."

"# A related trait of science is its destruction of idols, destruction of the gods men live by... Science has no absolute right or absolute justice... To live comfortably with science it is necessary to live with a dynamically changing system of concepts... it has a way of weakening old and respected bonds..."

"# Not only are the tenets of science constantly subject to challenge and revision, but its prophets are under challenge too..."

"# Further, the findings of science have an embarrassing way of turning out to be relevant to the customs and to the civil laws of men—requiring these customs and laws also to be revised..."

"# Certainly we have seen spectacular changes in the concept of private property and of national borders as we have moved into the space age..."

"# Moreover, the pace of technological advance gravely threatens the bountiful and restorative power of nature to resist modification..."

"# Another trait of science that leads to much hostility or misunderstanding by the non-scientist is the fact that science is practiced by a small elite... (which) has cultural patterns discernibly different from those of the rest of society..."

"# The trait that to me seems the most socially important about science, however, is that it is a major source of man's discontent with the status quo..."

"This day relenting God Hath placed within my hand A wondrous thing; and God Be praised. At his command, Seeking His secret deeds With tears and toiling breath, I find thy cunning seeds, O million-murdering Death."

"A theory which cannot be mortally endangered cannot be alive."

"Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not."

"If feminist psychology is correct, the very concept of scientific "objectivity" as a disciplined withdrawal of sympathy by the knower from the known, is a male separation anxiety writ large. Written, in fact, upon the entire universe."

"A scientist looks for a description of the universe in terms of a model that allows him to understand how things work, allow him to predict how things are going to work, and allows him to put together devices that work according to his predictions."

"The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions."

"What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know."

"Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know."

"Gradually, … the aspect of science as knowledge is being thrust into the background by the aspect of science as the power of manipulating nature. It is because science gives us the power of manipulating nature that it has more social importance than art. Science as the pursuit of truth is the equal, but not the superior, of art. Science as a technique, though it may have little intrinsic value, has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire."

"It is not in the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery—a bolt from the blue, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected."

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

"We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

"All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death."

"All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe—both the outside and the inside universe—without studying it. The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern—if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table—we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us."