Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.
Interpretation
Science is intriguing, but engineering applies scientific knowledge to create impactful solutions.
In this quote, Isaac Asimov emphasizes the distinction between science and engineering. While science can captivate and stimulate our curiosity about the natural world, it is engineering that utilizes this scientific understanding to drive practical advancements and tangible changes in society. This highlights the importance of both fields, but underscores that true world-altering innovations come from applying scientific principles through engineering.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech at a science fair to inspire young engineers.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
Forging differs from hoaxing, inasmuch as in the later the deceit is intended to last for a time, and then be discovered, to the ridicule of those who have credited it; whereas the forger is one who, wishing to acquire a reputation for science, records observations which he has never made.
The more one chases the quanta, the better they hide themselves.
We are survival machines β robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work-that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area.
I am actually weary of telling people that I do not pretend to adduce [direct] evidence of one species changing into another, but I believe that this view is in the main correct, because so many phenomena can thus be grouped end explained.
To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.
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