The word science is from the L. scire “to know” and seems to have originated from the idea of separating one thing from another as people sought to solve practical problems and understand the nature of the world around them.

The modern scientific method of acquiring knowledge is generally described as
1. observing a phenomenon,
2. forming a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon, and then
3. testing the hypothesis by means of objective, reproducible experiment.

This scientific method, proposed by Sir Francis Bacon, was considered ‘revolutionary’ and represents a marker date of changing attitudes and thinking about the world that was discernible from the time of Copernicus, Kepler and Vesalius.

The way science is viewed and operates, a “paradigm”,  introduced by historian Thomas Kuhn, so permeates the life of its time it is almost impossible to imagine another set of rules to describe reality.

As the exact boundaries of scientific disciplines are becoming blurry in our time, a benefit because knowledge acquired in the study of one subject is informative and applicable in other areas. Application of scientific knowledge, which by nature is incomplete, resulted in technologies that alter the basic nature they sought to manipulate. To assume that new technologies designed to remedy old technologies will be better informed is, ummm, unscientific?

Life sciences - biology, botany, and zoology:
Physical sciences - astronomy, chemistry, and physics: (Sense of Humor pop quiz)
Earth sciences - environmental, energy, geology, and weather & climate.

Sense of Humor

"The sun provides the moon with its brightness." ~Anaxagoras, Fragment in Plutarch De facie in orbe lunae, 929b, as quoted in The Riverside Dictionary of Biography (2005), p. 23 | Internet Archive

"I have found it! or I have got it!, commonly quoted as Eureka!" ~ Archimedes of Syracuse | Internet Archive

"Nature abhors a vacuum." ~ Aristotle | Internet Archive

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny...” ~ Isaac Asimov | Foundation Series at Amazon

“Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.” ~ Avicenna | Internet Archive

“Science is but an image of the truth.” ~ Sir Frances Bacon

“Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.” ~ Mary Baker Eddy

“The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism.” Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Theosophical Society

“We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.” ~ Omar Bradley

“Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.” ~ Stewart Brand | Amazon

“The kitchen's a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there's history. Yes, there's artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.” ~ Alton Brown | Official Website

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science." ~ Rachel Carson, Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952) for The Sea Around Us; also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91 | Amazon

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ~ Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's Third Law Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973) | Internet Archive

“Science is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.” ~ Frances Power Cobbe | Internet Archive

“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its beauty. ... Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of disappearing in our world. If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.” Marie Curie, as quoted in Madame Curie : A Biography (1937) by Eve Curie Labouisse, as translated by Vincent Sheean, p. 341

"Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly." ~ Leonardo da Vinci, XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations. | Project Gutenberg

“The time is always ripe for the re-interpretation of theories in the light of new vision and of new facts. This is the very province of science.” ~ Charles Darwin, Autobiography | Internet Archive

“The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.” ~ René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind: X.379. As quoted in Clarke, Desmond M. (2006). Descartes : a Biography. Cambridge Press. p. 67.

“In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.”

• “I think, therefore I am.” Discourse of the Method

ABOUT - In case you need some humor -
CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum -- whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made. Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

Internet Archive

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” ~ John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929), Ch. XI | Internet Archive

“The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.” ~ Freeman Dyson, 2011 | Amazon

~ Albert Einstein

“Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.”

“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson | Internet Archive

“Καὶ τὸ ὅλον τοῦ μέρους μεῖζον [ἐστιν]. And the whole [is] greater than the part.” ~ Euclid of Alexanderia | Internet Archive

“Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.”

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

~ Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Physics, CalTech

“I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.” ~ Sigmund Freud | Internet Archive

“In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” ~ Galileo as quoted in Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (1859) by François Arago Internet Archive

~ Mahatma Gandhi

“...my life consists of nothing else but numerous experiments with truth... If I can narrate them in a dispassionate and humble spirit... Far be it from me to claim any degree of perfectness.

“I claim for them nothing more than does a scientist who, though he conducts his experiments with utmost accuracy, forethought and minuteness, never claims any finality on conclusions, but keeps an open mind...

“I have gone through deep self-introspection, searched myself through and through, and examined and analysed every situation.

https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/gandhi-and-science.php

“Mathematics is the queen of sciences and arithmetic is the queen of mathematics” ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss | A Brief History of Mathematics - BBC | Gaussian Blur

“Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.” ~ Murray Gell-Mann | Amazon

“Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Internet Archive

“And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.”

“Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.”

~ J. B. S. Haldane | Internet Archive

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.” ~ Stephen Hawking | Amazon

“Whoever in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility may rest assured that he seeks in vain.” ~ Hermann von Helmholtz, Academic Discourse (Heidelberg 1862) | Internet Archive

“Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another...” ~ Thomas Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes Cartoon)

“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension... Once let the sheer isolation of the Earth become plain to every man, whatever his nationality or creed, and a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose. (1948) ” ~ Sir Fred Hoyle | Internet Archive

“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”

“Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.” ~ Edwin Hubble | Amazon

“Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.” ~ Thomas Huxley | Internet Archive

  "I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth . . . but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding. ~ August Kekulé, Account of his famous dream of the benzene structure, as quoted in A Life of Magic Chemistry : Autobiographical Reflections of a Nobel Prize Winner (2001) by George A. Olah, p. 54 | Internet Archive

"... The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. ... ~ Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger C. Weightman, declining to attend July 4th ceremonies in Washington D.C. celebrating the 50th anniversary of Independence, because of his health. This was Jefferson's last letter. (24 June 1826) | Internet Archive

~ Carl Gustav Jung

"Science is not ... a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself." ~

"Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.

~  In Jung’s 'Commentary' as translated for the English edition of Richard Wilhelm, The Secret Of The Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

 “Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.” Sermon: A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart

“Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.” ~ Arthur Koestler | Amazon

"It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, 'My God what have I done?"
~ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Stalin in Soul (1973). Quoted in Gary Westfahl, Science Fiction Quotations (2005), 322. | Amazon

~ Abraham Lincoln

"I know of nothing so pleasant to minds as the discovery of anything which is at once new and valuable; for nothing which so lightens and sweetens toil, as the hopeful pursuit of such discovery."

“As a natural historian according to the principles of science, up to the present time I have been not been able to discover any character by which man can be distinguished from the ape; for there are somewhere apes which are less hairy than man, erect in position, going just like him on two feet, and recalling the human species by the use they make of their hands and feet, to such an extent, that the less educated travellers have given them out as a kind of man.” ~ Carl Linnaeus, Fauna Suecica (1746) as quoted by Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999) | Internet Archive

“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” ~ John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Book II, Ch. 1, sec. 19 | Internet Archive

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft | Amazon

“In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.” ~ Mary McCarthy | Amazon

“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 or chemistry.” ~ H. L. Mencken | Internet Archive

Maria Montessori

“What is a scientist?… We give the name scientist to the type of man (sic) who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself." The Montessori Method

“The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.” ~ Lewis Mumford | Mumford at Amazon

“If I have ever made any valuable discoveries it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.” ~ Isaac Newton | at Internet Archive

“Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence." ~ Louis Pasteur | Internet Archive

“Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation." ~ Roger Penrose, “Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness”, p.7, Oxford University Press, USA | Amazon

“Number rules the universe." ~ Pythagoras of Samos

~ Teilhard de Chardin

"We have gone a long way towards solving a problem when we are able to formulate it."

~ Mother Teresa of Calcutta

"The greatest science in the world; in heaven and on earth; is love.” (attributed to MT) Do you know about the Mother Teresa Effect?

“Science does not know its debt to imagination.” ~ Henry David Thoreau | Internet Archive

~ Mark Twain

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Life on the Mississippi, 1883

“Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act.”

“Mysticism intends a state of “possession,” not action, and the individual is not a tool but “vessel” of the divine.”

~ Max Weber | Internet Archive

“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.’” ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” ~ E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) p. 294.

“We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.” ~ Woodrow Wilson