Science Quotes - Page 78

Stone is a primal matter, inhuman in its duration. Yet despite its incalculable temporality, the lithic is not some vast and alien outside. A limit-breaching intimacy persistently unfolds. Hurl a rock and you'll shatter an ontology, leave taxonomy in glistening shards.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being "psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life."When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. "While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge," she said. "You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying." A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three.

Michael Finkel

Turns out even NASA can't improve on duct tape.

Andy Weir

When power is discovered, man always turns to it," Bateson wrote darkly. "The science of heredity will soon provide power on stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time not, perhaps, far distant, that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation. Whether the institution of such control will ultimately be good or bad for that nation, or humanity at large, is a separate question." He had preempted the century of the gene.

Siddharta Mukherjee

Phenotype, in short, drags genotypes behind it, like a cart pulling a horse. It is the perennial conundrum of natural selection that it seeks one thing (fitness) and accidentally finds another (genes that produce fitness). Genes that produce fitness become gradually over-represented in populations through the selection phenotypes, thereby allowing organisms to become more and more adapted to their environments. There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. That is the engine that drives evolution.

Siddharta Mukherjee

This was the missing link in Darwin's Logic: reproductive incompatibility, ultimately derived from genetic incompatibility, drove the origin of novel species.

Siddharta Mukherjee

Muller was catapulted into the international fame by his discovery. The effect of radiation on the mutation rate in flies had two immediate implications. First, genes had to be made of matter. Radiation, after all, is merely energy. Frederick Griffith had made genes move between organisms. Muller had altered genes using energy. A gene, whatever it was, was capable of motion, transmission, and of energy-induced change properties generally associated with chemical matter.

Siddharta Mukherjee

Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

Lawrence M. Krauss

It isn't creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport

Siddharta Mukherjee

Gene, protein, function, and fate were strung in a chain: one chemical alteration in one base pair in DNA was sufficient to "encode" a radical change in human fate.

Siddharta Mukherjee

If you formulate your question properly, mathematics gives you the answer

Savas Dimopoulos

Those ignorant "masters of our destinies" who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education.Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think!

Alfred Korzybski

Philosophy, as defined by Fichte, is the "science of sciences." Its aim was to solve the problems of the world. In the past, when all exact sciences were in their infancy, philosophy had to be purely speculative, with little or no regard to realities. But if we regard philosophy as a Mother science, divided into many branches, we find that those branches have grown so large and various, that the Mother science looks like a hen with her little ducklings paddling in a pond, far beyond her reach; she is unable to follow her growing hatchlings. In the meantime, the progress of life and science goes on, irrespective of the cackling of metaphysics. Philosophy does not fulfill her initial aim to bring the results of experimental and exact sciences together and to solve world problems. Through endless, scientific specialization scientific branches multiply, and for want of coordination the great world-problems suffer. This failure of philosophy to fulfill her boasted mission of scientific coordination is responsible for the chaos in the world of general thought. The world has no collective or organized higher ideals and aims, nor even fixed general purposes. Life is an accidental game of private or collective ambitions and greeds.

Alfred Korzybski

Can a broken cistern hold water?

Lailah Gifty Akita

Emergent behaviors rely on computational geometry and scale.

R.A.Delmonico

As soon as you say, 'I'm going to use the legal system to impose my will on you,' you're buying into a lie,' schlichtmann said. 'You'll get chaos, and the system will dissapoint you. You'll get decision-making that only makes sense in Bedlam. We think the legal system is there for us, but it's not. It's there only for itself.

Dan Fagin

But in the cause of science men are expected to suffer.

Jules Verne

See, those who wield the primordial forces of creation have a long-running grudge with physics.

Jim Butcher

The splendor of God's work is the beauty of stars.

Lailah Gifty Akita

In the end, what I've learned is that when it comes to this type of science, you really can't be arrogant and assume you know the answers. Arrogance by these companies and by the government is what got us into all this in the first place.

Dan Fagin

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Mahatma Gandhi

I gazed at these marvels in profound silence. Words were utterly wanting to indicate the sensations of wonder I experienced. I seemed, as I stood upon that mysterious shore, as if I were some wandering inhabitant of a distant planet, present for the first time at the spectacle of some terrestrial phenomena belonging to another existence. To give body and existence to such new sensations would have required the coinage of new words - and here my feeble brain found itself wholly at fault. I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!

Jules Verne

Science, great, mighty and in the end unerring, science has fallen into many errors - errors which have been fortunate and useful rather than otherwise, for they have been the steppingstones to truth.

Jules Verne

And when you lay in bed with your wife,are you mentally there or with the women on TV? Or the women who you've been intimate with though the screens? You not only compare your wife to these women but also love her as though she was someone elsePhysically present when making love to her but mentally absent from herYou kiss her lips while your heart kisses the "screen woman

Amby C. Ezem

The problem with all fields of research is that people are impatient. It a particular line of enquiry seems to be making progress, we continue down the line, but if it seems to be getting nowhere, we abandon it. This is a problem because the route to the future is often tortuous. Things seems to be moving towards the goal but then unexpectedly snake off in the wrong direction. Initially unproductive approaches can often turn out to be the only ones that lead to the desired destination.

Steve Grand

Maybe if you had megaphones on your chest they'd listen to the words that came out of your lips

Amby C. Ezem

The mind you use to try to see your true self does not recognise if it has never seen. Once you stop looking within and realise you are the one doing the looking to recognise yourself, the mind will understand.

Dee-Anne Hayes

Mother Nature continues in motion while your mind is segmented with probabilities. Remembering your night dreams shows exactly this - fleeting scenes of experience with nothing in between. Dee-anne Hayes

Dee-Anne Hayes

It is possible to be too stable. No Outer World has colonized a new planet in two and a half centuries.. are lives too long to risk and too comfortable to upset.“I don’t know about that, Dr. Fastolfe. You’ve come to Earth. You risk disease.”“Yes, I do. There are some of us, Mr. Baley, who feel that the future of the human race is even worth the possible loss of an extended lifetime. Too few of us, I am sorry to say.”“In trying to introduce robots here on Earth, we’re doing our best to upset the balance of your City economy.”“You mean you’re creating a growing group of displaced and declassified men on purpose?”“Not out of cruelty or callousness, believe me. A group of displaced men, as you call them, are what we need to serve as a nucleus for colonization. Your ancient America was discovered by ships fitted out with men from the prisons. Don’t you see that the City’s womb has failed the displaced man. He has nothing to lose and worlds to gain by leaving Earth.

Isaac Asimov

The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there, And warmly debated the matter; The Orthodox said that it came from the air, And the Heretics said from the platter. They argued it long and they argued it strong, And I hear they are arguing now; But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese, Not one of them thought of a cow.

Arthur Conan Doyle

When I used to come home from school Mother used to ask me what happened that day, and I’d tell her,” said Miss Pefko. “Now I come home from work and she asks me the same question, and all I can say is—” Miss Pefko shook her head and let her crimson lips flap slackly— “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.”“If there’s something you don’t understand,” urged Dr. Breed, “ask Dr. Horvath to explain it. He’s very good at explaining.” He turned to me. “Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”“Then I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,” Miss Pefko mourned. “I don’t even know what a charlatan is.

Kurt Vonnegut

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm’s length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence’s poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of ‘mere things,’ when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – and are elaborated, with recurrences and variations, into something transportingly reminisce

Aldous Huxley

Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth.

Richard Preston

As the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane had described it in 1923, once the power to control genes had been harnessed, "no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.

Siddharta Mukherjee

The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made [since that time] falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century.""The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity [i.e. the genetic code], with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes, and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same." The sequence of the human genome, the project asserted, marked the starting point of the "fourth phase" of genetics. This was the era of "genomics" - the assessment of the entire genomes of organisms, including humans. There is an old conundrum in philosophy that asks if an intelligent machine can ever decipher its own instruction manual. For humans, the manual was now complete. Deciphering it, reading it, and understanding it would be quite another matter.

Siddharta Mukherjee

The taxi driver is someone who spends all day driving in city traffic (an activity that provokes either heart attack or delirium), in constant conflict with other human drivers. Consequently, he is nervous and hates every anthropomorphic creature.

Umberto Eco

It was a fungal party hellscape.

Robin Sloan

... despite the profound advances in molecular biology oer the past half-century, we still do not understand what life is, how it relates to the inanimate world, and how it emerged.

Addy Pross

What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are.

Wade Davis

in 2011, Rachel and I founded a company called Caribou Biosciences to commercialize the Cas proteins.

Jennifer A. Doudna

Editas Medicine has an exclusive multimillion-dollar license with Juno Therapeutics to develop T cell therapies

Jennifer A. Doudna

PGD has also been used for other controversial purposes, such as the birth if so-called savior siblings, destined from the moment of implantation not only to live their own lives, but also to serve as organ or cell donors for a sibling.

Jennifer A. Doudna

All unnatural control systems have a key element in their intricate composition – the fatality that they will naturally collapse.

Robert Neil Fleischer

Humans want answers, answers that compute; this does not compute Will Robinson! This was dialogue between a young boy and a robot from a TV series in the late 1960s. This TV series was a precursor for the new technology humans were about to be introduced to in the late twentieth century.

Nicholas M. Cuono Sr.

In relation to law I am doubtful whether, even at the present time, science has fairly begun.

H.G.Wells

In his fight against the powers of the surrounding world his first weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic is derived from the over-estimation of the individual’s own intellectual operations, from the belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, which, incidentally, we come across again in our obsessional neurotics.

Sigmund Freud

Morality established from Science is the key to understanding Coexistence.Science based on Morality is the reason we have prejudice for things we don't understand.

Anonymous

Nothing will stop us from stealing our place in the sun. - The Founder from Lost in Atlantis

Briton Heitt

Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.

Ludwig von Mises

we founded Editas Medicine with $43 million in financing from three venture capital firms.

Jennifer A. Doudna

We move through this world on paths laid down long before we are born.

Robert Moor

One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.

Richard Dawkins

If you've never done anything wrong it's probably because you have never tried anything new.

Albert Einstein

One can only wonder what the motivation is for Mauna Kea astronomers to subject their nighttime support staff to extremely long and fatiguing night shifts when they are easily avoidable.

Steven Magee

Extreme night shift work in high altitude astronomy is easily avoidable by using a split night shift where the first night shift starts before sunset and finishes at midnight and the second night shift starts with a new fresh person working through to after sunrise.

Steven Magee

Research suggests that sea level adapted humans that work at the very high altitude 13,796 feet summit of Mauna Kea may eventually develop sleep apnea and fatigue from the low oxygen environment.

Steven Magee

The Moon is the light of the night.

Lailah Gifty Akita

All of the above scenario's (wars and atrocities) were caused by the robot's possession of human emotions and thus motivation. ISMAIL has none and it and its successors will have none. It's sole motivation is to solve all of humanity's problems. While in the beginning, human emotions were clearly a survival mechanism, they are also the source of all conflict and clearly the least desirable trait for an artificial being, and maybe for modern humans as well. It is possible that emotions will evolve in an ASI, but unlikely because that takes millennia and requires some motivation like survival. ASI's survival depends on its service to humans. Anything else, we'd just pull the plug.

Steven Warr

As a general rule, if anyone ever asks you to put stockings on a ninety-year old deceased Romanian woman with oedema, your answer should be no.

Caitlin Doughty

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Science Quotes - Page 78

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