Science Quotes - Page 42

Now you know that the fascinating phenomenon of love has nothing to do with the supernatural entity known as Cupid, but everything to do with neurochemistry. Likewise, divinity is a cerebral creation, not a supernatural one. And it has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

It has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

Christ’s public life extended only over three years, and for this he had been silently training his mind for around thirty years. For years he had been breaking all the sociologically imposed ties of religious fundamentalism. For years he had been working in solitude to become liberated from the manacles of dogmatic bondage. And it is in the solitude that legends are born, and idiots are born in packs.

As palaeontologist Andrew Knoll once said, "Animals might be evolution's icing, but bacteria are really the cake.

Ed Yong

If the business of physics is ever finished, the world will be a much less interesting place in which to live . . .

How can anyone trust scientists? If new evidence comes along, they change their minds.

Terry Pratchett

Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.

The experience of seeing how our thought and our words and our ideas have been confined by the limitation of our experience is one which is salutary and is in a certain sense good for a man's morals as well as good for his pleasure. It seems to us [scientists] that this is an opening up of the human spirit , avoiding its provincialism and narrowness.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it feel from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they or their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.

Greg Egan

Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project.

Stan Goff

Your memories are you. There is, it seems, no other You.

Ted Todd

Three dimensional time converts scalar waves into transverse waves.

All these stories of Janamsakhi were like an artistic instrument that was yielded more to spread Nanak’s spiritual sovereignty as a mystical prophet than as an effective teacher in flesh and blood. In the midst of ignorance and mystical craving, they provided a simple method to guide people, or rather allure them to a newly formed religious path by sermonizing through stories of mystical non-sense.

All religions are mere echoes of this one great religion of Humanism.

We scientists perceive it as the Truth that will give us absolute understanding of the universe – which is impossible at the moment for a young species like us. On the other hand, the mystics perceive the Ultimate Truth, to be the attainment of Absolute Divinity, which all the religious giants experienced. But this attainment, is nowhere near the actual Ultimate Truth – it is only a subjective experience of the mind, evoked by specific internal and external stimuli.

Nanak’s encounter of God and God’s court was in fact a profound hallucinatory Near-Death Experience caused by drowning that strengthened his pre-conceived notion of a rational, compassionate and unorthodox society.

if you have returned then either its a deception or its a dream...from now no nightmares onwards.

if you have returned in my life then either its a deception or its a dream...from now no nightmares onwards

... science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.

Every mistake tried to teach but...I always tried to missAt the end i thought i was breaking myself...the mistakes were repeating without a helpfrom then i learn to learn from mistakes...whatsoever it takes,you will beat the best

Every mistake tried to teach but...I always tried to missAt the end i thought i was breaking myself...the mistakes were repeating without a helpfrom then i learn to learn from mistakes...whatsoever it takes,you will beat the bestwhen you dont repeat your mistakes...

The development of the telescope marks, indeed, a new phase in human thought, a new vision of life. It is an extraordinary thing that the Greeks, with their lively and penetrating minds, never realized the possibilities of either microscope or telescope. They made no use of the lens. Yet they lived in a world in which glass had been known and had been made beautiful for hundreds of years; they had about them glass flasks and bottles, through which they must have caught glimpses of things distorted and enlarged. But science in Greece was pursued by philosophers in an aristocratic spirit, men who, with a few such exceptions as the ingenious Archimedes and Hiero, were too proud to learn from such mere artisans as jewellers and metal- and glass-workers.Ignorance is the first penalty of pride. The philosopher had no mechanical skill and the artisan had no philosophical education, and it was left for another age, more than a thousand years later, to bring together glass and the astronomer.(The Earth in Space and Time §1)

H.G.Wells

She knew half of the correspondents had broken under the excruciating pressure. And the other half who said they had made it, simply lied. She also knew there was a good chance she would too. But it was still worth it. Because if Viola wanted anything approaching a deeper meaning, she knew it existed in moments filled with injustice and cruelty. That’s where true human nature lay for her. Not because of the ferocity itself but because of what came with it, true human heart and compassion.

Time to write down the ingredients for a pipe bomb.

The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons.

George R.R. Martin

There is one and only one statistical method for one objective in research.

Gayatri Vishwakarma

Life is better with a partner.

Melissa Mae Palmer

The initial animosity between divergent approaches can be overcome if we realize that each has something to offer that the other lacks. We may weave them together into a new whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts.

The reason [James Clerk] Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources to perform an act of discrimination. We imagine computation is free, but it never is. The very act of choosing which particle is cold or hot itself becomes an energy drain and a source of waste heat. The principle is also known as "no free lunch."We do our best to implement Maxwell's Demon whenever we manipulate reality with our technologies, but we can never do so perfectly; we certainly can't get ahead of the game, which is known as entropy. All the air conditioners in a city emit heat that makes the city hotter overall. While you can implement what seems to be a Maxwell's Demon if you don't look too far or too closely, in the big picture you always lose more than you gain.Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell's Demon, separating the state of "one" from the state of "zero" for a while, at a cost. A computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved.

There is even a certain tendency to punish those who do try to see. A case in point: At the dawn of the sexual revolution, social scientists produced statistical studies purporting to show that children are better off when quarreling parents divorce, that broken homes are just as functional as intact ones, and that cohabitation has no influence on the stability of a subsequent marriage. As anyone conversant with the field now knows, newer and more careful studies show all that to be wildly false. A young, untenured family sociologist whom I know used to circulate the results of these new studies secretly among other scholars. But he asked me and his other friends never to mention his name. Why? Because calling the mirage a mirage is a good way to end a career.

J. Budziszewski

The most non-understandable concept of the universe is TIME!

We seek only a place in our nations space future w/o discrimination. We ask as citizens of this nation to be allowed to participate with seriousness & sincerity in the making of history now…we offer you 13 women pilot volunteers.

Jeri Cobb

Sciences can only be validly constituted as ‘sacred sciences’ by those who, before all else, are in full possession of principia! Knowledge and are thereby qualified to carry out, in conformity with the strictest traditional orthodoxy, all the adaptations required by circumstances of time and place. However, when these sciences have been so established, their teaching may follow an inverse order: they then serve as it were as 'illustrations’ of pure doctrine, which they render more easily accessible to certain minds, and the fact that they are concerned with the world of multiplicity gives them an almost indefinite variety of points of view, adapted to the no less great variety of the individual aptitudes of those whose minds are still limited to that same world of multiplicity. The ways leading to knowledge may be extremely different at the lowest degree, but they draw closer and closer together as higher levels are reached. This is not to say that any of these preparatory degrees are absolutely necessary, since they are mere contingent methods having nothing in common with the end to be attained; it is even possible for some persons, in whom the tendency to contemplation is predominant, to attain directly to true intellectual intuition without the aid of such means; but this is a more or less exceptional case, and in general it is accepted as being necessary to proceed upward gradually. The whole question may also be illustrated by means of the traditional image of the 'cosmic wheel’: the circumference in reality exists only in virtue of the center, but the beings that stand upon the circumference must necessarily start from there or, more precisely, from the point thereon at which they actually find themselves, and follow the radius that leads to the center. Moreover, because of the correspondence that exists between all the orders of reality, the truths of a lower order can be taken as symbols of those of higher orders, and can therefore serve as 'supports’ by which one may arrive at an understanding of these; and this fact makes it possible for any science to become a sacred science, giving it a higher or 'anagogical’ meaning deeper than that which it possesses in itself.

Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?

Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful not in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes the caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals.

The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.

After the instrumentation was reset, Fermi told Weil to remove the rod another six inches. The pile was still subcritical. The intensity was increasing slowly - when suddenly there was a very loud crash! The safety rod, ZIP, had been automatically released. Its relay had been activated by an ionization chamber because the intensity had exceeded the arbitrary level at which it had been set. It was 11:30 a.m., and Fermi said, "I'm hungry. Let's go to lunch.

Albert Wattenberg

three tiers to the heart: physical, ethereal, Eternalwith each one being more spiritual and subtlethe physical heart a little brain with over 40,000 neuronsit sends and receives by electromagnetic field operationsit's got its own nervous system that senses and remembersmaking decisions and giving directions to other centersemitting enfolded energetic organizational patternsinformation, that is—communicative interactionsdetected outside the body by magnetometers and other peoplefor heart coherence listen to Pärt's “Spiegel im Spiegel”valid are chakras and acupuncture meridiansmeditate on the heart chakra to see what this meansenergy meridians are strings of polarized crystalline waterbioelectric signals transmitted in connective tissue matterinformation is sent along these lengths of collagen proteinsmolecules of structured water allowing the transfer of protonscrystal water wires inside protein pathwayswith acupuncture points being junctures in the mazethe protons, then, are what have been referred to as “chi”a current flowing, much like electrical circuitry

When the rods were pushed back in and the clicking had died down, we suddenly experiences a let-down feeling, for all of us understood the language of the counter. Even though we had anticipated the success of the experiment, its accomplishment had a deep impact on us. For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still we could not escape an eerie feeling when we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knowns will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.

Science is the desperate effort to catch up with the 13.8 billion year-old facts (give or take an eon or two).

Science is about the desperate effort to catch up with the 13.7 billion year-old facts (give or take an eon or two).

Dark matter is love. It's the attracting force.

As iron rusts when not used, and water gets foul from standing or turns to ice when exposed to cold, so the intellect degenerates without exercise.-Leonard Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

In the quantum multiverse all eventualities are possible. Which means, paradoxically, that all eventualities are inevitable. They have also quite possibly already happened. Make of that what you will, not that your will has much to do with it. Because here's the thing. If you believe that consciousness is an accumulation of memory; if you believe that you often know what's going to occur either through some animal instict or a human subscription to fate, then you are a walking and talking embodiment of everything happening all at once.

Emma Jane Unsworth

Geckos could caught by hand, but they could be found in the men's room.

Deh Gel

If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?

The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.

It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist. The blacker the night, the brighter the light.

Other animals are exceptionally good at identifying and reacting to predators, rivals and friends. They never act as if they believe that rivers or trees are inhabited by spirits who are watching. In all these ways, other animals continually demonstrate their working knowledge that they live in a world brimming with other minds as well as their knowledge of those minds' boundaries. their understanding seems more acute, pragmatic, and frankly, better than ours at distinguishing real from fake. So, I wonder, do humans really have a better developed Theory of Mind than other animals? ...Children talk to dolls for years, half believing or firmly believing that the doll hears and feels and is a worthy confidante. Many adults pray to statues, fervently believing that they're listening. ...All of this indicates a common human inability to distinguish conscious minds from inanimate objects, and evidence from nonsense. Children often talk to a fully imaginary friends whom they believe listens and has thoughts. Monotheism might be the adult version. ...In the world's most technologically advanced, most informed societies, a majority people take it for granted that disembodied spirits are watching, judging, and acting on them. Most leaders of modern nations trust that a Sky-God can be asked to protect their nation during disasters and conflicts with other nations. All of this is theory of mind gone wild, like an unguided fire hose spraying the whole universe with presumed consciousness. Humans' "superior" Theory of Mind is in part pathology. The oft repeated line "humans are rational beings" is probably our most half-true assertion about ourselves. There is in nature an overriding sanity and often in humankind an undermining insanity. We, among all animals, are most frequently irrational, distortional, delusional, and worried. Yet, I also wonder, is our pathological ability to generate false beliefs...also the very root of human creativity?

Mysticism and supernaturalism are the descendants of ignorance and fear.

[W]hen trying to understand the character of the modern mind, it is impossible to separate the effects of genes and the developmental environment.

I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.

Science is theology for an atheist

Science faculties at renowned research institutions were given two identical CVs to assess. Half the scientists received a CV with a female name, and half with a male name. The 'female' applicant was consistently rated as less competent and less hireable, and the scientists were less likely to want to mentor her. The 'male' candidate was offered a significantly higher starting salary

Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the worst way to explain the mysteries of life, except for Creationism.

Roberto Quaglia

There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brilliance and elegance that have beenrejected because they did not survive such a confrontation with experiment. In my view, the human condition would be greatly improved if such confrontations and willingness to reject hypotheses were a regular part of our social, political, economic, religious and cultural lives.

A good scientist must accept the challenge that one day everything he believes could be wrong.

There are species on this planet we've never seen. They live in lands and seas that no human has ever explored, and they are struggling to survive in a world unknown to us...We destroy their homes. And then they are gone, before we even have a chance to meet them. Every species on this planet tells a story, an evolutionary novel packed with generations upon generations of knowledge. Letting those species disappear is like setting fire to every library on earth...the key to understanding life itself- is right here: millions of years of trial and error, data we can never even hope to accrue on our own...The only way we will ever learn what animals have to teach us about ourselves- about life- is if we keep them around.

Christie Wilcox

In the society of thinking humanity, the natural law of trust should be - In I, I trust.

That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer… It is not to science, therefore but to metaphysics, imaginative literature or religion that we must turn for answers to questions having to do with first and last things.

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