The phrase "scientific optimism" is a correct and usable phrase in English.
You can use it when referring to a certain outlook or mindset of hope, inspired by the scientific discoveries and advances that have been made in recent years. For example, "The recent advances in medical science have brought about a sense of scientific optimism about future progress in the field."
What connects liberal Christianity, scientific optimism and self-help is the belief that human beings can generate their own wellbeing.
Naïve curiosity and scientific optimism lead us to discover that, as Oates puts it, "an entire alien civilization lurks on the underside of the known world".
Scientific optimism after the second world war led a leading American oncologist, Sidney Farber, to talk in 1962 of the underlying "singularity" of cancer, and to postulate a "universal cure".
The field of artificial intelligence was born in a fit of scientific optimism, in 1955, when a small group of researchers — three mathematicians and an I.B.M. programmer — drew up a proposal for a project at Dartmouth.
Capturing this fervour of scientific optimism was Antoine-Louis-Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy (1754 1836), who in the 1790s coined the term idéologie ("ideology") for his "science of ideas," which, he believed, could perfect society.
He is one of many students drawn by a surge of scientific optimism in the 1920s to Berlin, where a chance encounter with Einstein feeds his ambitions of making a great discovery.
He attacks, among others, the philosopher John Gray for his anti-scientific pessimism and the Daniel Dennett / Richard Dawkins axis for their pseudo-scientific optimism.
Re "Overpopulation Is Not the Problem" (Op-Ed, Sept. 14): Erle C. Ellis recounts his transition from a narrow, distorted biological determinism regarding the challenges facing the human population to a narrow, distorted social-scientific optimism that "the only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems".
The age that extended (depending on whom you ask) from sometime after the Civil War to sometime after World War II was one of scientific and technological optimism, of expanding personal and social freedoms and accelerating material abundance.
Optimism about scientific globalization is a wrinkle on the familiar story of outsourcing.
Subtitled "The Biology of Joy," the January article detailed scientific studies about why optimism is healthy.
