Best 9669 quotes in «science quotes» category

Right? I don’t know why I did it. Temporary insanity, maybe. Did you ever do something that makes absolutely no sense, but you couldn’t help yourself?

Robert Oppenheimer used to tell of the pioneer mysteries of building reliable Geiger counters that had low background noise. Among his friends, he said, there were two schools of thought. One school firmly held that the final step before one sealed off the Geiger tube was to peel a banana and wave the skin three times, sharply to the left. The other school was equally confident that success would follow if one waved the banana peel twice to the left and then, once, smartly to the right. (My counters were unbelievably bad because I didn't use either of these techniques.)

Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.

Robin, he chided her. He wanted to tell her all this would happen to her, too, that her luck would turn as well. But he had no good arguments for this, and she had no reason to believe him. Such luck as his was far too rare. “I hope it all works out,” she said, looking up, and then, as if afraid to sound too stingy, she added, “I’m sure it will.” He bent down to kiss her, but she turned away slightly, and his lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “Please be happy for me.

Rocket science is not really rocket science.

Sadly, because of our tribal brains, science carries a hefty cost. Treasured ideas that are loved by the community may be left behind, unable to compete with conflicting observations. Admired heroes may be found to have been mistaken. Years of hard work can amount to nothing thanks to a single observation, making a lifetime of effort seem like a waste of time. For our tribal brain, the philosopher’s toolbox is full of double-edged knives, capable of cutting away our hopes with the myths.

Salmon mysteriously return to their riverine birthplace after years of being away at sea. We are still learning how they do this, but scientists agree that smell is one of their navigation tools. What if we were born in a tidepool and our attraction to the sea is a coming home?

Salt waters shall be found in the sweet, and all friends shall destroy one another; then shall wit hide itself, and understanding withdraw itself into his secret chamber-

Sandy beaches still rim the lakes, but if Lake Michigan, for example, were drained it would now be possible to walk almost the entire 100 miles between Wisconsin and Michigan on a bed of trillions upon trillions of filter-feeding quagga mussels.

Save the world? I don't think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing's going to fix it, maybe not even science.

Saying that 'art lacks practical application' is like saying 'I can’t eat money'—it’s technically true but horribly misleading about the importance of the item in question.

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.” The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

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.

Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.

Science can now help us to understand ourselves in this way by giving factual information about brain structure and function, and how the mind works. Then there is an art of self knowledge, which each person has to develop for himself. This art must lead one to be sensitive to how his basically false approach to life is always tending to generate conflict and confusion. The role of art here is therefore not to provide a symbolism, but rather to teach the artistic spirit of sensitive perception of the individual and particular phenomena of one's own psyche. This spirit is needed if one is to understand the relevance of general scientific knowledge to his own special problems, as well as to give effect to the scientific spirit of seeing the fact about one's self as it is, whether on elikes it or not, and thus helping to end conflict. Such an approach is not possible, however, unless one has the spirit that meets life wholly and totally. We still need the religious spirit, but today we no longer need the religious mythology, which is now introducing an irrelevant and confusing element into the whole question. Itwould seem, then, that in some ways the modern person must manage to create a total approach to life which accomplishes what was done in earlier days by science, art and religion, but in a new way that is appropriate to the modern conditions of life. An important part of such an action is to see what the relationshipbetween science and art now actually is, and to understand the direction in which this relationship might develop.

Science discovered long ago that carbon is a source of life. The ashes of my faith have prepared the ground for the planting of seeds that have produced new forms of truth, morality and meaning on my own terms, not according to the dogma laid down by religious ruffians or a vengeful God. If, as believers claim, the word "gospel" means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel, other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a journalist and free-thinking human being, I have come not to favor and fear religion, but to face and fight it as an impediment to civilized advancement.

Science doesn't care what you believe in.

Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego.

Science finds it hard to decipher the mysteries of the mind largely because we lack efficient tools. Many people, including many scientists, tend to confuse the mind with the brain, but they are really very different things. The brain is a material network of neurons, synapses and biochemicals. The mind is a flow of subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, anger and love. Biologists assume that the brain somehow produces the mind, and that biochemical reactions in billions of neurons somehow produce experiences such as pain and love. However, so far we have absolutely no explanation for how the mind emerges from the brain. How come when billions of neurons are firing electrical signals in a particular pattern, I feel pain, and when the neurons fire in a different pattern, I feel love? We haven’t got a clue. Hence even if the mind indeed emerges from the brain, at least for now studying the mind is a different undertaking than studying the brain.

Science gave us forensics. Law gave us crime.

Science has given us the truth but taken away our tranquillity.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

Science increases our understanding in proportion as it lowers our pride.

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

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.

Science is beautiful because of its endless curiosity.

Science is entirely dependent on constants. Anything that is not constant (natural disasters, poor construction, or other human factors) is nearly impossible to include in equations such as those used in archaeology and for dating the Earth.

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.

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.

Science is knowledge meeting humility meeting curiosity: ever-evolving, always learning. Atheism is often but knowledge meeting arrogance: a masquerade under the wing of the beauty of science. Religion is infamously a weight under the one wing; then under the other is atheism, the championed masquerade.

Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense.

Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed.

Science can make a heart beat with ventilator, but there is only one power that makes it live, that is LOVE which is the purest form of FAITH.

Science can neither prove nor disprove Scripture; it can hope only to begin to understand it.

Science does not stand as a moral guardian of humanity, rather it attempts to stand as the least subjective, least biased and least sociologically conditioned friend to humanity, when humanity seeks answers of real significance.

science enables you to look things differently.

Science explains the how. Philosophy explains the why. Free-thinkers need both.

Science gives us the ability to pull back the skin of life and reveal the truth of things. It allows us to understand the mysteries of mountain-making and falling stars. But knowledge isn't meant to be held as a weapon in a battle to defy our fates and manipulate life over death. Evil lodges too easily in men's hearts. What will happen if they assume the power to create life?

Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and most of these dogmas have been false. All stories about gods and devils, of heavens and hells, as they do not conform to nature, and are not apparent to sense, should be rejected without consideration. Beyond the universe there is nothing and within the universe the supernatural does not and cannot exist. Of all deceivers who have plagued mankind, none are so deeply ruinous to human happiness as those imposters who pretend to lead by a light above nature. The lips of the dead are closed forever. There comes no voice from the tomb. Christianity is responsible for having cast the fable of eternal fire over almost every grave.

Science in its truest form is and will always remain compatible with human rights and equality.

Science is a proven concept with standards. Wisdom is the knowledge of life that we learn by living it.

Science is a satisfactory curiosity.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything. The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.

Science is the most effective, efficient and magnificent path that leads towards the salvation of humankind.

Science itself, no matter whether it is the search for truth or merely the need to gain control over the external world, to alleviate suffering, or to prolong life, is ultimately a matter of feeling, or rather, of desire-the desire to know or the desire to realize.

Science literacy is an important part of what it is to be an informed citizen of society.

Science literacy is being plugged into the forces that power the universe. There is no excuse for thinking that the Sun, which is a million times the size of Earth, orbits Earth.

Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Science needs no more progress, it has already progressed too far from happiness