Science Quotes - Page 67

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard Feynman

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

Terry Pratchett

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Albert Einstein

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery eac

Albert Einstein

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

Christopher Hitchens

Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer from siderodromophobia. Having misgivings about your mother-in-law is pentheraphobia, and being petrified of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth is arachibutyrophobia. And then there’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s affliction, the fear of fear itself, or phobophobia.

Meg, what I'm about to do - never, ever try this on your own." I felt a bit silly giving this advice to a girl who regulartly fought monsters with golden swords, but I had promised Bill Nye the Science Guy I would always promote safe laboratory practices.

... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives.“What on earth is that?” “That’s my Kung Fu,” he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack.“Is that what you wanted to show me?”“No, but it’s impressive, isn’t it?”“If you say so.”Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device.

E.A. Bucchianeri

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

...space flight still had a long way to go to catch up with the safety record of the milkshake industry.

The humble Cumulus humilis - never hurt a soul.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney

If you removed all the arteries, veins, & capillaries from a person’s body, and tied them end-to-end…the person will die.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I can't imagine the scientists wanting me to walk into the lab and start fiddling around with some big bowl of electrons they had out.

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events.

Gian-Carlo Rota

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Log Entry: SOL 118My conversation with NASA about the Water Reclaimer was boring and riddled with technical details. So I'll paraphrase for you:Me: "This is obviously a clog. How about I take it apart and check the internal tubing?"NASA: (After about 5 hours of deliberation) "No. You'll fuck it up and die."So I took it apart.

Andy Weir

In a Sense, we all are Time Travelers! We are Surviving each and every Active Time-Point in this Timeline.......

Sufis deny the absolute reality of time, space and physical form. These things are both relative and local. They only appear to be absolute.

Our image is here and will for ever stay,and there is comfort in knowing that the memory of our lives will always be there,traveling among the stars.

Christophe Galfard

Did I see them waving?' said Mrs Liberty'And particling, I shouldn't wonder' said the Alderman

Terry Pratchett

There is more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of by your philosophy.

William Shakespeare

Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.

Rachel Naomi Remen

Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on — up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely “animal” life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn.

H.G.Wells

Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself.

Rachel Naomi Remen

A simple statement of untruth in words is called a lie. If a lie is perpetrated not merely by words but by methodic action it is called a fraud. It the action consists in creating a false object and putting it forward as a true object, we call it a forgery….A lie, a fraud, a forgery always imply conscious and deliberate action with the purpose to deceive.

J. Assmuth and Ernest R. Hull

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

... who can forget the amazement of a child balancing an adult on a see-saw, simply by being placed at the right position. How could this be? Where did all that extra force come from!?The only wonder nowadays is that a physics student is unlikely to produce a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps we will be offered a few mumblings about moments, force times distance, laws of the lever perhaps even the "principle of virtual work". But we probably won't get an answer that seems to explain where that extra force comes from; and it is highly unlikely that we will get an answer that begins by establishing principles about rigid bodies, even though the rigidity of the lever is an absolute necessity for it to work.In fact, the whole path from Newton's Laws, which basically concern "point masses", to bodies whose shape and extent are significant, is often rather dubiously traversed, even though elementary physics courses blithely pose such problems of the most diverse sorts.

Science is great for us. But for someone who see the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is a just a one instant and younger than a baby.

Muditha Champika

Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is just a one instant and younger than a baby.

Muditha Champika

To be honest, i know noting about religion, since the world was created thousand of years ago, am just 30 years of age, and have stopped asking questions about how things came to being, but the truth about what i know is that the truth does not exit because i know noting

Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world ... a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing ... we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man.” This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world’s leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent.

Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the humans for more than one million years, science is just a one instant like a baby trying to talk.

Muditha Champika

Perhaps as they say in science love is a reaction, and in art, it is a heart, but for me, love is simply you.

Eyden I.

There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.

In fact, science is neither materialist nor idealist; it is simply science. It’s impartial and can’t be answerable for the direction of its conclusions.

Valerian Pidmohylny

Movement is life!

Alessandro Boccaletti

But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany — two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import....Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches” and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope?

All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.

And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; an if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.

For many years I have been saying that I would like to write a book (or series of books) called Physics for Mathematicians. Whenever I would tell people that, they would say, “Oh good, you're going to explain quantum mechanics, or string theory, or something like that”. And I would say, “Well that would be nice, but I can't begin to do that now; first I have to learn elementary physics, so the first thing I will be writing will be Mechanics for Mathematicians”. So then people would say, “Ah, so you're going to be writing about symplectic structures”, or something of that sort. And I would have to say, “No, I'm not trying to write a book about mathematics for mathematicians, I'm trying to write a book about physics for mathematicians”; …… it's elementary mechanics that I don't understand. … I mean, for example, that I don't understand this – lever.... Most of us know the law of the lever, but this law is simply a quantitative statement of exactly how amazing the lever is, and doesn't give us a clue as to why it is true, how such a small force at one end can exert such a great force at the other. Now physicists all agree that Newton's Three Laws are the basis from which all of mechanics follows, but if you ask for an explanation of the lever in terms of these three laws, you will almost certainly not get a satisfactory answer.

And although the space they occupy isn’t like normalspace, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of atail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings andyour eyeballs eventually realize that the space between eachdragon is, in fact, another dragon.

Terry Pratchett

It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery.

The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect. It may not seem as though she should. The architect would appear tobe more skilled (as the word is usually defined) and better educated (again, as usually defined). But little girls don’t grow up dreaming of becoming prostitutes, so the supply of potential prostitutes is relatively small. Their skills, while not necessarily “specialized,” are practiced in a very specialized context. The job is unpleasant and forbidding in at least two significant ways: the likelihood of violence and the lost opportunity of having a stable family life. As for demand? Let’s just say that an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa.

When we say to someone, "Oh you're behaving like an animal," it's actually a compliment rather than an insult. We need to work for a science of peace and build a culture of empathy, and emphasize the positive, pro-social side of the character of other animals and ourselves. It's truly who we and other animals are.

Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.

Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law.

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks: What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion.

School taught me how to do language, maths and science; it failed to teach me the very basics of how to keep my home healthy.

Nothing comes from nothing

Why does Eleanor let you have that much acid?" he asked. "Why would you want that much acid? You don't need that much acid.""Except that it appears I do, since I have just enough to dissolve a human body, and we have a human body in need of dissolving," said Jack. "Everything happens for a reason. And Eleanor didn't 'let' me have this much acid. I sort of collected it on my own. For a rainy day.""What were you expecting it to rain?" said Christopher. "Bears?

[One way] researchers sometimes evaluate people's judgments is to compare those judgments with those of more mature or experienced individuals. This method has its limitations too, because mature or experienced individuals are sometimes so set in their ways that they can't properly evaluate new or unique conditions or adopt new approaches to solving problems.

By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science....

Orson Scott Card

Pre-modern forms of authority , based predominantly upon value-rationality and natural law, are here succeeded by legal-rational forms of domination and by the rule of instrumental reason. With this, religious beliefs and ultimate ideals gradually recede from (public) life as they are disenchanted by the claims of 'rational' science and are replaced increasingly by the idealized pursuit of secular, material ends. This leads to a world in which questions of meaning and value disappear from the public arena, and in which the scope for creative action and for the pursuit of ultimate values becomes increasingly restricted. And in this regard, the twin processes of cultural and social rationalization lead to the same end: to a condition of nihilism in which the highest 'ultimate' values are devalued, or devalue themselves, and hence, for the most part, are no longer able to guide social action, which itself becomes, in turn, increasingly routinized and mundane.

... With the 'death' of God worldly values proliferate, separate out and are drawn into endless conflict with one another. This process leads to the formation of a world torn by an infinite number of value-conflicts, for 'rational' (scientific) knowledge, which, for Weber, is limited to questions of fact rather than value, is unable to resolve the crisis of values that it itself inaugurated.

... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).

It's survival of the hang-in-there's, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs.

Bill Nye

Previous 1 … 65 66 67 68 69 … 83 Next