Quotes on the Nature of Science

• “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge”
– Carl Sagan
• “[Science is] the desire to know causes.”
– William Hazlitt (1778-1830) English essayist.
• “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”
– Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954
• “Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.”
– Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1905
• “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”
– Carl Sagan
• “Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam?
Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.”
• “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding of a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
-Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) English physicist, mathematician.
• “An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer”
– Max Planck.
• “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
― Albert Einstein
• "Nature's Laws are the invisible government of the earth."
- Alfred A. Montapert
• “Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” [Original spelling: 'ye sholders of Giants.']
– Sir Isaac Newton
• “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
– Albert Einstein
• “The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”
-William Lawrence Bragg
• “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...”
― Isaac Asimov
• “If you thought science was certain – well, that was just an error on your part”
– Richard Feynman. Choose ‘TWO’ of the many quotes given above. Discuss what the quote means to you and what it tells you about the ‘nature of science’.

Quote 1: “Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam?
Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.”
What it means to me and what it tells me about the nature of science:

Science is constantly changing and will never stop changing. What we learn today will be different to what people will be learning in 10 years’ time. Science will always be changing and there is no way to stop it but to only keep up with it and learn and discover more. The questions they asked 100 years ago will be the same questions we ask today but will have a different and more complex answer as we now know more than we previously did.

Quote 2: “If you thought science was certain – well, that was just an error on your part”
– Richard Feynman.

What it means to me and what it tells me about the nature of science:

This quote means that science is never one hundred per cent accurate as we do not have enough proof. There is never just a simple explanation for a phenomenon in science; most explanations for events in our natural world are either laws or theories. Theories do not have enough proof to be certain and can still