A Quote by Reinout Willem van Bemmelen

As geology is essentially a historical science, the working method of the geologist resembles that of the historian. This makes the personality of the geologist of essential importance in the way he analyzes the past.

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen

Quote Topics

Essential Essentially Geologist Geology Historian Historical Importance Makes Method Past Personality Resembles Science Way Working

Quote Author

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen
Dutch - Geologist
April 14, 1904 - November 19, 1983

Essentially every scientist, when posed with the question, "If you want to get science knowledge from Mars, do you want to send a geologist or do you want to send a robot?" Well, the real answer is, you can send 100 robots for the price of sending one geologist, so let's send 100 robots to 100 different locations, and then we would all benefit. So that's the answer you would get. And I agree with that answer.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

Walt Whitman

[In geology,] As in history, the material in hand remains silent if no questions are asked. The nature of these questions depends on the "school" to which the geologist belongs and on the objectivity of his investigations. Hans Cloos called this way of interrogation "the dialogue with the earth," "das Gesprach mit der Erde."

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen

Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means.

Charles Lapworth

One of the defining experiences of my life came in the mid-1980s. After working for two years as a geologist in Colorado, I lost my job and my career during that long recession.

John Hickenlooper

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

Stephen Jay Gould

I am a geologist.

Robert Ballard

The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.

John Ruskin

I would have been a geologist.

Stephen Sondheim

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

Erik Erikson

. . . What role does historiography play in the way a society and culture "remembers" past events? Does the historian have a moral or civic responsibility to this project of memory that ought to influence the way he or she engages in historical practice? Should moral concerns influence the historian's choice of subject matter, of issues to discuss, of evidence to use?