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… a large portion of every true student’s work must be outside the classroom. -- George Washington Carver

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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. --Max Planck, physicist

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Adaptation to the weather, to the inanimate vicissitudes of ice ages and droughts, may well not be progressive: just an aimless tracking of unprogressive meandering climatic variables. But adaptation to the biotic environment is likely to be progressive because enemies, unlike the weather, themselves evolve. -- Richard Dawkins, in a review of “Full House” by Stephen Jay Gould, in the Journal Evolution, 1997

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An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t. -- Anatole France, French author and critic (1844-1924)

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I point to the following unwelcome truth: much as we might dislike the implications, research is showing that didactic exposition of abstract ideas and lines of reasoning (however engaging and lucid we might try to make them) to passive listeners yields pathetically thin results in learning and understanding ‑ except in the very small percentage of students… Arnold Arons (1997, p. vii)

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What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup. -- Boris Pasternak, Russian poet

The future in the modern imagination has always stretched out ahead like a broad highway drawing us onward with the promise of tomorrow. Now rather suddenly, as it becomes impossible to ignore dramatic physical changes taking place across the Earth, the future looms like an urgent question. Whatever the coming century brings, it will not unfold smoothly as some improved but largely familiar version of life as we know it. This is the only thing that seems certain. --Dianne Dumanoski, environmental journalist, from “The End of the Long Summer”, 2009.

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Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.    -- Richard Feynman, physicist

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The [person] who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. 

-- Edward John Phelps, American diplomat (1822-1900)

 

If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants. - Isaac Newton

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It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this the plant goes to wreck and ruin without fail.-- A. Einstein in “Autobiographical Notes” 1949

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Reason or the ratio of all we have already known is not the same that it shall be when we know more.-- William Blake

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The students are alive, and the purpose of education is to stimulate and guide their self-development. It follows as a corollary from this premise, that the teachers also should be alive with living thoughts. -- A. N. Whitehead

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As a result of modern research in physics, the ambition and hope, still cherished by most authorities of the last century, that physical science could offer a photographic picture and true image of reality had to be abandoned. -- M. Jammer, in Concepts of Force, 1957

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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.-- A. N. Whitehead

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(It is unbelievable) that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal, five feet high, who in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.-- Voltaire, French philosopher and writer (1694-1778)

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To understand is hard. Once one understands, action is easy. -- Sun Yat-sen, Chinese statesman (1866-1925)

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUJF6ke1SoE

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We all know that the real reason universities have students is in order to educate the professors. -- John Archibald Wheeler, 1976

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The overarching lesson that has emerged from scientific inquiry over the last century is that human experience is often a misleading guide to the true nature of reality. Lying just beneath the surface of the everyday is a world we’d hardly recognize. -- Brian Greene, American author

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Everything important is, at bottom, utterly simple. -- John Archibald Wheeler, American physicist

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"How quick are we to learn, that is, to imitate what others have done or thought before. And how slow to understand, that is, to see the deeper connections. Slowest of all, however, are we in inventing new connections or even in applying old ideas in a new field." -- Frits Zernike, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1953.

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One had to be a Newton to see that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall. -- Paul Valéry, French poet and philosopher, 1871-1945

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What makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit…The answer is not far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inwards. -- Richard Feynman, physicist

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7DkeQ0roAM&feature=player_embedded

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Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of the development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature’s laws at different levels. -- Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel banquet speech, 1969

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It is essential that [students] acquire an understanding of and lively feeling for values. [They] must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise [they] – with [their] specialized knowledge – more closely resemble a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.-- from A. Einstein, New York Times editorial, 1952

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I do not see that the sex of the candidate (Emmy Noether) is an argument against her admission as Privatdozent (Lecturer). After all, we are a university, not a bathing establishment. -- David Hilbert (At a faculty meeting, Univ. of Goettingen, 1915)

Leaving all questions of sex aside, she is one of the ten or twelve leading mathematicians of the present generation in the entire world and has founded…the Modern School of Algebraists. -- Norbert Weiner (A. Dick, Emmy Noether 1882-1935, p. 30)

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For me, the study of [Nature’s] laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations. -- Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel banquet speech, 1969

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Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- H.G. Wells (1920)

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The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. . . . There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them. . . . Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. . . . Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.- Seneca, Natural Questions, first century