Science Quotes - Page 2

Discovery first flew in 1984, the third orbiter to join the fleet. It was named for one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook. Space shuttle Discovery is the most-flown orbiter; today will be its thirty-ninth and final launch. By the end of this mission, it will have flown a total of 365 days in space, making it the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Discovery was the first orbiter to carry a Russian cosmonaut and the first to visit the Russian space station Mir. On that flight, in 1995, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft. Discovery flew twelve of the thirty-eight missions to assemble the International Space Station, and it was responsible for deploying the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was perhaps the most far reaching accomplishment of the shuttle program, as Hubble has been called the most important telescope in history and one of the most significant scientific instruments ever invented. It has allowed astronomers to determine the age of the universe, postulate how galaxies form, and confirm the existence of dark energy, among many other discoveries. Astronomers and astrophysicists, when they are asked about the significance of Hubble, will simply say that it has rewritten the astronomy books. In the retirement process, Discovery will be the “vehicle of record,” being kept as intact as possible for future study.Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of Challenger and then again after the loss of Columbia. To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope. ‘Don’t worry,’ Discovery seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad. 'Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth.’ And then she did.

Margaret Lazarus Dean

Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.

Nessa Carey

Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.

Konrad Lorenz

Columbus gave Europe a New World; [Alexander von] Humboldt made it known in its physical, material, intellectual, and moral aspects.

José Cipriano de la Luz y Caballero

[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.

Charles Darwin

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.

Carl Sagan

In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule. ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons—to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy.One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place.

Henry Enfield Roscoe

He [Alexander von Humboldt] was to science what Shakespeare was to the drama.

Robert G. Ingersoll

For a dying man it is not a difficult decision [to agree to become the world's first heart transplant] ... because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would not accept such odds if there were no lion.

Christiaan Barnard

I believe that this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.

John F Kennedy

You can flip a coin but Schrodinger's pet cat will still be in that box.

Scott Edward Shjefte

When religion ceases to be speculative and becomes factual and "true", it will become science. Science can be used to prove or disprove opinions, beliefs and accusations. Until any religion crosses that line, who is anyone to use their religion to judge others?

Christina Engela

This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity's turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left - indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages - for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifically explored and technically outdone. After this shift, 'being perfect' takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their turn: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection.

Peter Sloterdijk

It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition - or the hope - that on this score our position is ever likely to be revised. There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences, more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one.

Jacques Monod

Io, Europa, Ganimedes puer, atque Calistolascivo nimium perplacuere Iovi.(Io, Europa, the boy Ganymede, and Callisto greatly pleased lustful Jupiter.)[Marius naming Jupiter's moons]

Simon Marius

the Z-particle Pure energy—no mass at all. It may well be thesmallest building block in nature. Matter is nothing but trapped energy.

Dan Brown

...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant...

Gary Taubes

Science is implausible to untutored human common sense, but that in no way casts doubt on the correctness of well-established scientific findings. Feelings of transcendence are simply that—feelings—and, as such, have no capacity to reveal truths about a world external to the people who have them.

Russell Blackford

Time... is an essential requirement for effective research. An investigator may be given a palace to live in, a perfect laboratory to work in, he may be surrounded by all the conveniences money can provide; but if his time is taken from him he will remain sterile.

Walter Bradford Cannon

[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a bend in the road.(Opening address to the Mechanical Science Section, Meeting of the British Association, Manchester.)

Osborne Reynolds

Knowledge of Nature is an account at bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded; and hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed.

Grove Karl Gilbert

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

Steven D. Levitt

It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.

John Steinbeck

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. … Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; … [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. … A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.

G H Hardy

Have pity on them all, for it is we who are the real monsters.

Bernard Heuvelmans

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like... [It] often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that the novelty shall not be suppressed for very long... [N]ormal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.

Thomas Kuhn

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.

Carl Sagan

People tend to think that mathematicians always work in sterile conditions, sitting around and staring at the screen of a computer, or at a ceiling, in a pristine office. But in fact, some of the best ideas come when you least expect them, possibly through annoying industrial noise.

Edward Frenkel

Of the many 'firsts' with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute —including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the world—the achievement that may have the greatest impact on health care did not occur in the operating room or in the research laboratory. It happened on a piece of paper... when we created the first-ever packaged pricing plan for cardiovascular surgical procedures.

Denton Cooley

In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age.

Thomas Gold

There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Even if god was proved beyond doubt that he did not exist. We would still believe in him. We don't need hard facts, we need true emotions.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The Gobi wasn't completely devoid of life; its ecosystem was unexpectedly extensive and varied given the extremes to which it subjected its denizens, but some of those forms of life weren't the kind that Anna wanted to admire too closely.

A. Ashley Straker

JULIAN HUXLEY’S “EUGENICS MANIFESTO”:“Eugenics Manifesto” was the name given to an article supporting eugenics. The document, which appeared in Nature, September 16, 1939, was a joint statement issued by America’s and Britain’s most prominent biologists, and was widely referred to as the “Eugenics Manifesto.” The manifesto was a response to a request from Science Service, of Washington, D.C. for a reply to the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Two of the main signatories and authors were Hermann J. Muller and Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley, as this book documents, was the founding director of UNESCO from the famous Huxley family. Muller was an American geneticist, educator and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Put into the context of the timeline, this document was published 15 years after “Mein Kampf” and a year after the highly publicized violence of Kristallnacht. In other words, there is no way either Muller or Huxley were unaware at the moment of publication of the historical implications of eugenic agendas.

A.E. Samaan

There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be able to dig out the veins easily and advantageously, and to obtain more abundant results from his mining. Secondly there is Medicine, that he may be able to look after his diggers and other workman ... Thirdly follows astronomy, that he may know the divisions of the heavens and from them judge the directions of the veins. Fourthly, there is the science of Surveying that he may be able to estimate how deep a shaft should be sunk ... Fifthly, his knowledge of Arithmetical Science should be such that he may calculate the cost to be incurred in the machinery and the working of the mine. Sixthly, his learning must comprise Architecture, that he himself may construct the various machines and timber work required underground ... Next, he must have knowledge of Drawing, that he can draw plans of his machinery. Lastly, there is the Law, especially that dealing with metals, that he may claim his own rights, that he may undertake the duty of giving others his opinion on legal matters, that he may not take another man's property and so make trouble for himself, and that he may fulfil his obligations to others according to the law.

Georgius Agricola

There are over a million types of fish in the sea as there are flowers in all of the world's gardens. There are at least a million different types of minerals as there are species of birds or monkeys. The possible configurations of lifeforms that could be created from a single atom are infinite. There are at least a billion people on this earth, and no two faces look the same. It is very arrogant to assume that we have seen all of God's miracles.

Suzy Kassem

There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.

George Pólya

Hypotheses like professors, when they are seen not to work any longer in the laboratory, should disappear.

Henry Edward Armstrong

The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is not the scientist’s job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives.

Edward Teller

every successful hardware has a software behind

Thiru Voonna

Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, and being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch.

J.B.S. Haldane

The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.

Leslie White

If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.

Jez Humble

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

Alain de Botton

Despite all our amazing ability, ingenuity, technology and industry humans are the one species who have not mastered the art of simplicity.

Rasheed Ogunlaru

Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.

Henri Poincaré

There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death.

Robert A.F. Thurman

I am here tracing the History of the Earth itself, from its own Monuments.

Jean-André de Luc

I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the

William Herschel

Doesn't it make you crazy??The thought that everything is one day, the time doesn't exist (it's an illusion), everything has happen in one day, but in different periods (I still ask my self how scientist even live?? With such thoughts, just thinking on what they know about the space and how something can eat us and how something is so powerful that is called quasar and it's other stars + that it's bigger than the sun, it's more powerful... How they even live, for god sake..What's the interesting thing to watch how one shadow it makes the moon (where is magic - I know it and I sound and I'm like a person who is spoiled), so the moon makes the shadow the big shadow on this planet, the moon can't handle the whole circle planet so it (1)

Deyth Banger

We see it [the as-yet unseen, probable new planet, Neptune] as Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.

William Herschel

Should a priest reject relativity because it contains no authoritative exposition on the doctrine of the Trinity? Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . . . The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses.

Georges Edouard Lemaître

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

Nicholas Murray Butler

This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequal

Urbain Le Verrier

Everyone's life changes when they meet their Obi-Wan & their Yoda, or their Morpheus & their Oracle; those who help remove the veil.

Brandi L. Bates

Be selective in your battles...

Brandi L. Bates

It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms.

Christiaan Barnard

I did not know of any single soul who succeed in life without a mentorship.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Science Quotes - Page 2

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