
To someone my age, Mr. Wizard was synonymous with science. I watched him on tv and tried again and again to duplicate his feats, such as putting a silk scarf into a glass of colored water and pulling it out dry.
My friend Chris is a hardware/software engineer who reads Scientific American cover-to-cover for pleasure and his father was a science teacher. I emailed him about Mr. Wizard as soon as I heard that he had passed on.
He wrote:
I learned a lot from Mr. Wizard, and my dad always loved watching it with me (or, actually, me watching it with him) and he often explained more details about the science with me and taught me a lot. I remember an episode where Mr. Wizard showed 4 ways to cook a hot dog: over fire; in boiling water; electrical wires plugged into a hot dog to be "electrocuted"; and then he wrapped a hot dog in a napkin, put a toothpick through it, put it on a paper plate then then put it in a "Microwave Oven" for 30 seconds and it came out steaming, but the paper hadn't burned!! My dad knew about this technology but I could hardly believe it and never thought it would become commonplace (I always remembered this when microwave ovens first became available)...
I collected together some favorite quotes about science, which I believe is one of our hopes for the future, if we use it (like any tool) wisely.
For Chris:
The microwave oven is the consolation prize in our struggle to understand physics. ~Jason Love
Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science. ~Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954
No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer. ~Thomas Browne
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. ~Henry J. Tillman
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. ~Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. ~Wernher Von Braun
Science does not know its debt to imagination. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. ~John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men. ~Jean Rostand
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
A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. ~Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual, 1965
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it. ~Alan Valentine
Science is simply common sense at its best. ~Thomas Huxley
Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things. ~Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics"
Physics is imagination in a straight jacket. ~John Moffat
If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos. ~Robert Quillen
Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it. ~Albert Einstein
To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ~Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 1995
The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it. ~Robert L. Park, in The New York Times, 7 December 1999
The great men of science are supreme artists. ~Martin H. Fischer
Science is the topography of ignorance. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Medical Essays, 1883
Observations always involve theory. ~Edwin Hubble
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions. ~Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit, 1964
Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature. ~Martin H. Fischer
I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy. ~Bertrand Russell, Icarus, or the Future of Science, 1925
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law. ~William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1910
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974
There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible. ~Richard Davisson
The doubter is a true man of science; he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science. ~Claude Bernard
Science without conscience is the soul's perdition. ~François Rabelais, Pantagruel, 1572
Science is the record of dead religions. ~The Oscariana of Oscar Fingall O'Flaherty Will Wilde [1856-1900] for George Bernard Shaw
Physics is geometric proof on steroids. ~S. Sachs
Ethics and Science need to shake hands. ~Richard Clarke Cabot
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. ~Albert Einstein
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. ~Marston Bates
Life preys upon life. This is biology's most fundamental fact. ~Martin H. Fischer
DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine. ~Kenneth Boulding, "Energy and the Environment," Beasts, Ballads, and Bouldingisms, 1976
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. ~George Wald
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed. ~Thomas Henry Huxley
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. ~Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, 1926
Science, in the very act of solving problems, creates more of them. ~Abraham Flexner, Universities, 1930
Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more. ~George Bernard Shaw
There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science. ~Anton Chekhov
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact. ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook, 1956
But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. ~Francis Darwin
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. ~Gerard Piel
Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts. ~George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, 1896
Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money. ~Leon Lederman
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. ~Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes
The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk. ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook, 1956
Not fact-finding, but attainment to philosophy is the aim of science. ~Martin H. Fischer
There is no gravity. The earth sucks. ~Graffito
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988
In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics. ~Immanuel Kant
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry. ~H.L. Mencken, "Minority Report," Notebooks, 1956
Recent Comments