Curtiosity about scientific laws

Dick the Butcher:  The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

— William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Henry the Sixth, Part 2, IV, ii, 64

The very concept of 'laws of nature' is, in contemporary usage, both a product and an expression of the absence of reflectivity.  It introduces into the study of nature a metaphor indelibly marked by its political origins.

— Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 - ), Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, 1985, 131.

Volumi eguali di gas nelle stesse condizioni di temperatura e di pressione contengono lo stesso numero di molecole.  (Equal volumes of gas under the same conditions of temperature and pressure contain the same number of molecules.)

— Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Avogadro (1776 - 1856), a lawyer, proposes 'Avogadro's Hypothesis', now called 'Avogadro's Law'.

The important point is not the bigness of Avogadro's number, but the bigness of Avogadro.

— Henry Albert Bent (1926 -  ), The Second Law, OUP, 1965.

God did not create the planets and the stars with the intention that they should dominate man, but that they, like other creatures, should obey and serve him

— Paracelsus, Concerning the Nature of Things, c. 1541

The pious Jew or Moslem abhors pork without being conscious that it was awareness of the danger of trichinosis which probably caused his law-makers to impose the prohibition.

— Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, University paperbacks, 1967, 60.

There are ignorant people who speak flowery words and take delight in the letter of the law, saying that there is nothing else.

— Bhagavad Gita, 2:42, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

— Max Planck (1858 - 1947), quoted in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, p. 151.

Scientific law is of a totally different nature from civil law; it does not involve an intelligent lawgiver, a command, and a corresponding duty.  It is a brief description in mental shorthand of as wide a range as possible of the sequences of our sense-impressions.

— Karl Pearson (1857 - 1936), The Grammar of Science, Everyman edition, p. 98.

The judge then went on to speak of self-paste learning, and it was then that we realised that the worthy jurist, for all his worthiness, did not have a glue.

— Duncan Bain (1944 - ) 'First let's kill all the lawyers', in A Manual Cant, Breek-Anathema Press, 1988.