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To contribute usefully to the advance of science, one must sometimes not disdain from undertaking simple verifications.
--
As quoted in The Life and Science of Léon Foucault : The Man Who Proved the Earth Rotates (2003) by William Tobin, p. 72, ISBN 0521808553

 

Leon Foucault

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[The notion of equilibrium] is a notion which can be employed usefully in varying degrees of looseness. It is an absolutely indispensable part of the toolbag of the economist and one which he can often contribute usefully to other sciences which are occasionally apt to get lost in the trackless exfoliations of purely dynamic systems.

 

Kenneth Boulding

 

We hardly know the limit of intelligence of individuals who can fruitfully contribute to science in one way or another if they are given the proper training – including graduate training – as assistants, as supervised or semi-independent researchers, as team members. Individuals with any of a very broad spectrum of intellectual attributes can contribute to science.

 

Roland W. Schmitt

 

Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." "In science the more we know, the more extensive the contact with nescience." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom … The more men know, the smaller the share of all that knowledge becomes that any one mind can absorb. The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible.

 

Francis Bacon

 

The true line is not between “hard” natural science and “soft” social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world.

 

Herbert Simon