Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Poincare' on science

I was reading the October 2005 article on Henri Poincare' (one of my scientific heroes) in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. In it, they give the following excerpt of one of Poincare's speeches:

"Freedom is for Science what air is for animal; deprived of this freedom, it dies from suffocation, like a bird deprived of oxygen. And this freedom must be without limits, because, if one wants to impose limits, one gets a half-science only, and a half-science is no longer science, because it can be, and necessarily is, a false science. Thought must never be subordinated to any dogma, political party, passion, interest, preconceived idea, to anything indeed, except the facts themselves, because, for science, to be subordinated means to die."

Amen!

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