Natural Science

"That is better and more valuable which requires fewer, other circumstances being equal. [...] For if one thing were demonstrated from many and another thing from fewer equally known premises, clearly that is better which is from fewer because it makes us know quickly, just as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it produces knowledge from fewer premises. Similarly in natural science, in moral science, and in metaphysics the best is that which needs no premises and the better that which needs the fewer, other circumstances being equal." (Robert Grosseteste," Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros", cca. 1217–1220)

"Reason may be employed in two ways to establish a point: first for the purpose of furnishing sufficient proof of some principle, as in natural science, where sufficient proof can be brought to show that the movement of the heavens is always of uniform velocity. Reason is employed in another way, not as furnishing a sufficient proof of a principle, but as confirming an already established principle, by showing the congruity of its results […]" (Saint Thomas Aquinas, "Summa Theologica", cca. 1266-1273)

"Day by day natural science accumulates new riches […] The true system of the World has been recognized, developed and perfected […] Everything has been discussed and analyzed, or at least mentioned." (Jean le Rond d’Alembert, "Elements of Philosophy", 1759)

"It is impossible to disassociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality." (Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, "Traite Elementaire de Chimie", 1789)

"Of all the natural sciences, astronomy is that which presents the longest series of discoveries. The first appearance of the heavens is indeed far removed from that enlarged view, by which we comprehend at the present day, the past and future states of the system of the world." (Pierre-Simon Laplace," The Systems of the World" Vol. 1, 1830)

"As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention." (James J Sylvester, "A Plea for the Mathematician", Nature Vol. 1, 1870)

"The aim of natural science is to obtain connections among phenomena. Theories, however, are like withered leaves, which drop off after having enabled the organism of science to breathe for a time." (Ernst Mach, "Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit", 1871)

"Hence, even in the domain of natural science the aid of the experimental method becomes indispensable whenever the problem set is the analysis of transient and impermanent phenomena, and not merely the observation of persistent and relatively constant objects." (Wilhelm Wundt, "Principles of Physiological Psychology", 1874)

"The theory most prevalent among teachers is that mathematics affords the best training for the reasoning powers; […] The modem, and to my mind true, theory is that mathematics is the abstract form of the natural sciences; and that it is valuable as a training of the reasoning powers, not because it is abstract, but because it is a representation of actual things." (Truman H Safford, "Mathematical Teaching and Its Modern Methods", 1886)

„The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection, - for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience, - we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science" (George Santayana, "The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory", 1896)

"Our science, in contrast with others, is not founded on a single period of human history, but has accompanied the development of culture through all its stages. Mathematics is as much interwoven with Greek culture as with the most modern problems in Engineering. She not only lends a hand to the progressive natural sciences but participates at the same time in the abstract investigations of logicians and philosophers." (Felix Klein, "Klein und Riecke: Ueber angewandte Mathematik und Physik" 1900)

"So completely is nature mathematical that some of the more exact natural sciences, in particular astronomy and physics, are in their theoretic phases largely mathematical in character, while other sciences which have hitherto been compelled by the complexity of their phenomena and the inexactitude of their data to remain descriptive and empirical, are developing towards the mathematical ideal, proceeding upon the fundamental assumption that mathematical relations exist between the forces and the phenomena, and that nothing short, of the discovery and formulations of these relations would constitute definitive knowledge of the subject. Progress is measured by the closeness of the approximation to this ideal formulation." (Jacob W A Young, "The Teaching of Mathematics", 1907)

"The methods of tektology, as is seen, combine the abstract symbolism of mathematics and the experimental character Of the natural sciences. Furthermore, the very formulation of its problems, the very treatment of organizedness by tektology, as has been elucidated, should stick to the social historical viewpoint. And whatever the subject matter, or the content, of tektology , it embraces the whole world of experience. So tektology is really a universal science by its methods and its content."  (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science" Vol. I, 1913)

"Two divisions are distinguished in all natural sciences - 'statics' which deals with forms in equilibrium, and 'dynamics' which deals with the same forms, as well as their motion, in the process of change. […] Statics always evolves earlier than dynamics, the former being then reconstructed under the influence of the latter. The relationship between mathematics and tektology is seen to be similar: one represents the standpoint of organizational statics and the other - that of organizational dynamics. The latter standpoint is the more general, for equilibrium is only a particular case of motion, and in essence, is just an ideal case resulting from changes which are completely equal but quite opposite in direction." (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science" Vol. I, 1913)

"And now, in our time, there has been unloosed a cataclysm which has swept away space, time, and matter hitherto regarded as the firmest pillars of natural science, but only to make place for a view of things of wider scope, and entailing a deeper vision." (Hermann Weyl, "Space, Time, Matter", 1922)

"Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objective of tektology is basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all the other sciences and of all the human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method, that is, it is interested only in the modes of organization of this subject matter." (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektologia: Vseobshchaya Organizatsionnaya Nauka" ["Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science"], 1922)

"The 'physical' does not mean any particular kind of reality, but a particular kind of denoting reality, namely a system of concepts in the natural sciences which is necessary for the cognition of reality. 'The physical' should not be interpreted wrongly as an attribute of one part of reality, but not of the other ; it is rather a word denoting a kind of conceptual construction, as, e.g., the markers 'geographical' or 'mathematical', which denote not any distinct properties of real things, but always merely a manner of presenting them by means of ideas." (Moritz Schlick, "Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre", 1925)

"Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view." (Max Planck, "Religion and Natural Science", 1937)

"[…] science conceived as resting on mere sense-perception, with no other source of observation, is bankrupt, so far as concerns its claim to self-sufficiency. Science can find no individual enjoyment in nature: Science can find no aim in nature: Science can find no creativity in nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of Natural Science. They are inherent in it methodology." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Modes of Thought", 1938)

"A […] difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare." (Lawrence J Henderson, "The Study of Man", 1941)

"The 'cybernetics' of Wiener […] is the science of organization of mechanical and electrical components for stability and purposeful actions. A distinguishing feature of this new science is the total absence of considerations of energy, heat, and efficiency, which are so important in other natural sciences. In fact, the primary concern of cybernetics is on the qualitative aspects of the interrelations among the various components of a system and the synthetic behavior of the complete mechanism." (Qian Xuesen, "Engineering Cybernetics", 1954)

"We speak in terms of ‘acceptance’, ‘confidence’, and ‘probability’, not ‘proof’. If by proof it is meant the establishment of eternal and absolute truth, open to no possible exception or modification, then proof has no place in the natural sciences." (George G Simpson, "Life: An Introduction to Biology", 1957)

"[...] mathematics is not free to develop as it will, but is bound by certain restrictions: by conceptions derived either a posteriori from natural science, or assumed to be imposed a priori by an absolutistic philosophy." (Carl B Boyer, "The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development", 1959)

"Theories are usually introduced when previous study of a class of phenomena has revealed a system of uniformities. […] Theories then seek to explain those regularities and, generally, to afford a deeper and more accurate understanding of the phenomena in question. To this end, a theory construes those phenomena as manifestations of entities and processes that lie behind or beneath them, as it were." (Carl G Hempel, "Philosophy of Natural Science", 1966)

"The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos." (Herbert A Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1969)

"In natural science we are concerned ultimately, not with convenient arrangements of observational data which can be generalized into universal explanatory form, but with movements of thought, at once theoretical and empirical, which penetrate into the intrinsic structure of the universe in such a way that there becomes disclosed to us its basic design and we find ourselves at grips with reality.… We cannot pursue natural science scientifically without engaging at the same time in meta-scientific operations." (Thomas F Torrance, "Divine and Contingent Order", 1981)

"The word theory, as used in the natural sciences, doesn’t mean an idea tentatively held for purposes of argument - that we call a hypothesis. Rather, a theory is a set of logically consistent abstract principles that explain a body of concrete facts. It is the logical connections among the principles and the facts that characterize a theory as truth. No one element of a theory [...] can be changed without creating a logical contradiction that invalidates the entire system. Thus, although it may not be possible to substantiate directly a particular principle in the theory, the principle is validated by the consistency of the entire logical structure." (Alan Cromer, "Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science", 1993)

"Nature is not ‘given’ to us - our minds are never virgin in front of reality. Whatever we say we see or observe is biased by what we already know, think, believe, or wish to see. Some of these thoughts, beliefs and knowledge can function as an obstacle to our understanding of the phenomena. […] mathematics is not a natural science. It is not about the phenomena of the real world, it is not about observation and induction. Mathematical induction is not a method for making generalizations." (Anna Sierpinska, "Understanding in Mathematics", 1994)