Orrery/explanation

Famous quotes containing the words orrery and/or explanation:

    Word of gloom from the war, one day;
    Johnston pressed at the front, they say.
    Little Giffen was up and away;
    A tear—his first—as he bade good-by,
    Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye.
    “I’ll write, if spared!” There was news of the fight;
    But none of Giffen.—He did not write.
    —Francis Orrery Ticknor (1822–1874)

    To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.
    Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)