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Science Quotes
"Belonging to me doesn't mean I'll make you do anything, it just means I consider you mine for as long as this lasts. It means I protect you, it means I take care of you. For another man, it might mean something different. Don't confuse me with another man."
20
"Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same genus (Homo) but of different species, although no one (at least lately) has attempted the appropriate experiments to see if crosses of them with us would produce fertile offspring."
20
"Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true."
20
"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere."
20
"If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips."
20
"The fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air."
20
"There are no arbitrary constants ... nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory)."
19
"The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them."
19
"Stephen Hawking said that his quest is simply "trying to understand the mind of God"."
19
"It is now almost possible to assign color combinations, based on the colors of clouds and sky, to every planet in the Solar System-from the sulfur-stained skies of Venus and the rusty skies of Mars to the aquamarine of Uranus and the hypnotic and unearthly blue of Neptune. Sacre-jaunt, sacre-rouge, sacre-vert. Perhaps they will one day adorn the flags of distant human outposts in the Solar System, in that time when the new frontiers are sweeping out from the Sun to the stars, and the explorers are surrounded by the endless black of space. Sacre-noir."
19
"We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance."
19
"Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an "ape legacy that humans are doomed to live by."
19
"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it."
19
"We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon."
19
"Nothing is made, nothing disappears. The same changes, at the same places, never stopping."
19
"How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps."
19
"In scientific discovery, it's not the subject or object reveals the information to the scientist, but the awareness field of his own mind, reveals the details, at the time of deep focus on the subject or object."
19
"Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that "animals try to spread their genes. That misstates the facts and it misstates the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. That love makes them try to keep their children warm, fed, and safe. What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes "try to spread themselves by wiring animals' brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe."
19
"Genetic engineering was messy. To force a sequence of foreign DNA into a plant, you couldn't just snip the desired gene from the bacteria and sew it on to the plant's DNA sequence like an old woman working on a quilt."
19
"I believe in a world in which science is the key for supporting thedevelopment of a happy future for humanity. So, I advocate for such asituation in which scientists would speak louder. If science is silent, there is no way to solve high priority problems at a global level, such as: the gap between developed and undeveloped countries, poverty, limited energy resources, limited food and even drinking water (especially related to the population growth phenomenon), global warming and rapid climatechanges, etc."
19
"It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence."
19
"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."
19
"The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced."
19
"There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."
19
"That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation."
19
"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."
19
"Energetically speaking, antimatter is the mirror image of matter, so the two instantly cancel each other out if they come in contact.Keeping antimatter isolated from matter is a challenge, of course, because everything on earth is made of matter. The samples have to be stored without ever touching anything at all-even air."
19
"I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America."
19
"The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern."
19
"Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe."
19
"Science has proven that subatomic particles can exist in two places at once. Since we are all made up of these particles, then this simple fact should drastically re-define every limitation that you think you have."
19
"In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded."
19
"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."
19
"I am glad to have this opportunity of expressing my high appreciation of the honour extended to me many years ago by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science by enrolling me amongst its members."
19
"Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation."
19
"No definite sciencewithout trial & error."
18
"Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs."
18
"Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct."
18
"Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another, it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program."
18
"I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic."
18
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