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Science Quotes
"I dispute the point that nuclear energy is 'clean' and 'cost-effective'. As I recall, when we first harnessed nuclear power it was to drop an atom bomb on a civilian population, not to save the environment. However, you must admit, the victors are never tried for war crimes."
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"The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in science wanes, the country loses ground to the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency."
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"Water flows, but never changes. It's always H2O."
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"Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other."
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"Life is a journey. When we stop, things don't go right."
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"Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence."
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"It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease]."
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"Some say we are not like humans but we are more like them than we are different. Man and animals are in the same species as mammals as they have mammary glands that produce the milk to nurse their young. Their lungs breathe air and their blood is warm. They are vertebrates in that their skeletal system and well-designed spines hold their bodies together. Each cell is made of molecules, each molecule is made of atoms, and each atom is made of protons, neutrons and mostly electrons, which are made of waves of fibered light."
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"When asked about which scientist he'd like to meet, Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "Isaac Newton. No question about it. The smartest person ever to walk the face of this earth. The man was connected to the universe in spooky ways. He discovered the laws of motion, the laws of gravity, the laws of optics. Then he turned 26."
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"Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect."
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"Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature."
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"If a photon is emitted by an electron inside of a clock on Earth and it travels to a clock four light years away, time stops for the clock on Earth and time jumps forward eight years for the distant clock, also the electron that will capture the photon becomes infinitely large, relative to the photon but the electron that emitted it does not become infinitely small therefore, time is not perfectly symmetrical."
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"There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing."
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"Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once."
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"The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself."
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"Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite 'telescope envy' at gatherings of amateur astronomers."
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"If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well."
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"Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology."
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"The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?"
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"The only cure for science is more science, not less. We are suffering from the effects of a little science badly applied. The remedy is a lot of science, well applied."
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"There are three states of matter but what state one is in that matters."
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"Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent. Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes."
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"One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn't matter where you were born, and it doesn't matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you'll get the same result."
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"I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that."
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"Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated."
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"He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,' the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. 'Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they'd finally found out what it was?''I missed that,' I murmured. ' I saw that,' said Sandra. 'About two days ago.''That's right,' said the bartender.'What is the secret of life?' I asked.'I forget,' said Sandra.'Protein,' the bartender declared. 'They found out something about protein.''Yeah,' said Sandra, 'that's it."
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"A typical chromosomal DNA molecule in a human being is composed of about five billion pairs of nucleotides. But since there are four different kinds of nucleotides, the number of bits of information in DNA is four times the number of nucleotide pairs. Thus if a single chromosome has five billion (5 X 10^9) nucleotides, it contains twenty billion (2 X 10^10) bits of information. We also see that if more than some tens of billions (several times 10^10) of bits of information are necessary for human survival, extragenetic systems will have to provide them: the rate of development of genetic systems is so slow that no source of such additional biological information can be sought in the DNA."
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"You don't get to have an opinion on whether .999 is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we owe it to them and to the universe to respect what they've figured out."
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"A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter."
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"Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?"
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"Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it."
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"There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late."
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"Any religion that cannot stand up to a modern scientific reasoning, and to rational proof, is asinine."
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"As the wireless radiation industry continues to drastically increase the number of transmitters, electromagnetic researchers are documenting the range of new adverse health conditions that are emerging in the masses."
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"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."
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"When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier."
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