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Science Quotes
"Indeed science alone may perhaps be sterile when pursued without an understanding of the world in which scientific knowledge is created and in which the fruits of science are used."
6
"We live in the Age of the Higher Brain, the cerebral cortex that has grown enormously over the last few millennia, overshadowing the ancient, instinctive lower brain. The cortex is often called the new brain, yet the old brain held sway in humans for millions of years, as it does today in most living things. The old brain can't conjure up ideas or read. But it does possess the power to feel and, above all, to be. It was the old brain that caused our forebears to sense the closeness of a mysterious presence everywhere in Nature."
6
"Of course genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life."
6
"I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."
5
"The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism."
5
"I study Astronomy because it is the loftiest form of science available. It is the highest possible reaches that we can go to with knowledge and understanding. Every day, we get to look into infinity, into the everlasting, into time, space, space-time and into both the past and the future. Every day, we redefine what exists; we dance on the borders of reality and the unreal. I hardly even dare say the word, "unreal. We have yet to prove that word."
5
"All the explanations proposed seem to beonly partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation."
5
"Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close."
5
"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of."
5
"The brain, which operates on electromagnetic impulses, is as much an activity of the universe as are the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere or on a distant star. Therefore science is one form of electromagnetism that spends it time studying another form science is god explaining god through a human nervous system isn't spirituality the same thing?"
5
"There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth."
5
"Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible."
5
"If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips."
5
"They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted."
5
"The framing of a problem is often far more essential than its solution."
5
"I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals."
5
"Yes, human salvation will come through science, but only through the nature-respecting science!"
5
"I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed."
5
"In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind."
5
"At the age of 46 I was starting to see the appearance of rainbow halos and starbursts around bright nighttime lights, problems reading small print, focusing issues with my eyes, and image recognition issues. I had been exposed to bright high powered 20 watt scattered sodium LASER light a decade earlier in very high altitude astronomy."
5
"He explained that unlike our other classes in the program, research was all about prediction and control. I was smitten. You mean that rather than leaning and holding, I could spend my career predicting and controlling? I had found my calling."
5
"Psychology is more concerned with identifying the degree of mental disorder and less with its cure!"
4
"What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary."
4
"Private enterprise can never lead a space frontier. It's not possible because a space frontier is expensive, it has unknown risks and it has unquantified risks."
4
"Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law."
4
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
4
"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it."
4
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