"As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise - by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?"(Charles Babbage, "Passages from the Life of a Philosopher", 1864)
"In Science, all tends to stir, to change, to form fresh surfaces. All denies, destroys, creates, replaces all. What was ground yesterday is put into the hopper again today. The colossal machine, Science, never rests. It is never satisfied; it is insatiable for improvement, of which the absolute knows nothing." (Victor Hugo, "William Shakespeare", 1864)
"If the activity of a science can be supplied by a machine, that science cannot amount to much, so it is said; and hence it deserves a subordinate place. The answer to such arguments, however, is that the mathematician, even when he is himself operating with numbers and formulas, is by no means an inferior counterpart of the errorless machine [...]" (Felix Klein, "Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint", 1908)
"Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo." (William J Bryan, "Undelivered Trial Summation Scopes Trial", 1925)
"Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo." (William J Bryan, 1925)
"The common view of science is that it is a sort of machine for increasing the race’s store of dependable facts. It is that only in part; in even larger part it is a machine for upsetting undependable facts." (Will Durant, 1931)
"The overwhelming presence of machines and instrumentation must be one of the most salient features of the modern scientific laboratory […] The development of science depends at least as much on new machinery as it does on new ideas." (Ronald Giere, "Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach", 1988)
"Physics is the basic science of matter and energy, and engineering is physics applied to structures and machines. They and chemistry are the sciences that biologists need to explain the structure and mechanism of living things." (R McNeill Alexander, "Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants", 1989)
"The fallibility of methods means that there is no cookbook approach to doing science, no formula that can be applied or machine that can be built to generate scientific knowledge […] The skillful application of methods to a challenging problem is one of the great pleasures of science." (Committee on the Conduct of Science [National Academy of Sciences], "On Being a Scientist", 1989)
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