Best 9669 quotes in «science quotes» category

During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do these experiments force us to believe about the nature of the world? I would ask, What is the most. simple and general picture of the world that we can formulate that is not ruled by these experiments? I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing.

During this time (at high school) I discovered the Public Library... It was here that I found a source of knowledge and the means to acquire it by reading, a habit of learning which I still follow to this day. I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. I soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours. I made the (to me) astounding discovery that the pigments I extracted changed their colours when I changed the pH of the solution.

During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an all-milkshake meal plan on groups of college students living in a simulated space capsule at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964. A significant portion of it ended up beneath the floorboards.)

Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.

Each little update - each individual bit of social information - is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

Each star had cost an effort. For each there had been planning, watching and anticipation. Each one recalled to me a place, a time, a season. Each one now has a personality. The stars, in short, had become my stars.

Each volcano is an independent machine—nay, each vent and monticule is for the time being engaged in its own peculiar business, cooking as it were its special dish, which in due time is to be separately served. We have instances of vents within hailing distance of each other pouring out totally different kinds of lava, neither sympathizing with the other in any discernible manner nor influencing other in any appreciable degree.

Each one will always find in his age a reasonable reason to doubt

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

Each star system is an island in space, quarantined from its neighbors by the light-years. I can imagine creatures evolving into glimmerings of knowledge on innumerable worlds, every one of them assuming at first their puny planet and paltry few suns to be all that is. We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos.

Earth is not the only planet where there is life,' Sandra began. I frowned. 'Well, yeah, the NASA thinks there are aliens in outer space, right? Or maybe in other planets. You into science?' Sandra exchanged a confused glance with Janis. 'No,' she said slowly. 'I'm not particularly a science geek and I'm not talking about aliens or planets, Nashira, I'm talking about a star.

Earth was the winner of the ultimate lotto, with 500 million to one odds, this one planet, of comparable, size to its other 17 billion siblings, became the life force of the universe itself. But the inhabitants of earth did not just inherit life, they inherited all that life has to offer a sentient species. It offers them —as a gift— love, joy, surprise, wonder, friendship, as well as spirituality, art, literature, music, and most importantly morality. A morality that is capable of reaching beyond its species to that of other living creatures on this shared fishbowl called Earth.

Eat healthy. Work hard. Stay strong. Worry less. Dance more. Love often. Be happy...

Earth is not ours, we are earth’s

Ewww... intelligent design people! They're just buck-toothed, Bible-pushing nincompoops with community-college degrees who're trying to sell a gussied-up creationism to a cretinous public! No need to address their concerns or respond to their arguments. They are Not Science. They are poopy-heads. There. I just saved you the trouble of reading 90 percent of the responses to the ID position... This is how losers act just before they lose: arrogant, self-satisfied, too important to be bothered with substantive refutation, and disdainful of their own faults... The only remaining question is whether Darwinism will exit gracefully, or whether it will go down biting, screaming, censoring, and denouncing to the bitter end. — Tech Central Station contributor Douglas Kern, 2005

Education and knowledge are no longer values of truth and beauty that make life worth living- they are reduced to an economic means to the ends of greater pay and more consumption.

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

Education consists primarily in perfecting the art/science of connecting apparently disparate dots.

...education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between "learning" and "memorizing" is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.

Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.

Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great art science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.

Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.

Einstein said that if quantum mechanics were correct then the world would be crazy. Einstein was right - the world is crazy.

Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes to authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.

Either god exists or it doesn’t exist. If a god does exist, it either interacts with the universe in some detectable way or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, that god is indistinguishable from a non-existent god. That only leaves a god who interacts with the universe in some detectable way. But if science, which is the greatest realization of the use of our senses to, you know, detect things, hasn’t found this god, that doesn’t say much for individuals. In short, the god you’ve created is, in fact, undetectable by science. The limits of science are not the province of religious knowledge. Where science is ignorant, so is religion. The only difference is that religion lacks the integrity of science.

Electric power is like good health: When you have it, you don't think about it. When you don't have it, that's all you think about.

El cielo es una injuria perpetua e insoportable. Las estrellas no me conocen y yo no podré nunca hacer nada de ellas ni contra ellas. Cuando he sabido a cuántos millares de años de luz distan de mí, y cuántos siglos emplea su claridad para llegar a la Tierra, no he hecho más que dar forma aritmética a mi rabia. Yo siento el cielo como algo extraño, remoto, esto es, enemigo. Los cometas que, sin un objeto razonable, arrastran su cola por el infinito, no me dicen nada que me consuele. Las nebulosas, amontonamientos confusos de polvo cósmico, me exasperan como todas las cosas informes no terminadas. En lo que se refiere a los planetas y a los satélites, aduladores extintos que dan vueltas para obtener la limosna de un poco de luz, me causan repugnancia y despecho.

El universo no fue hecho a medida del hombre; tampoco le es hostil: es indiferente.

El obispo pasa a argüir que 'el universo ha sido hecho y está gobernado por un propósito inteligente' y que sería una falta de inteligencia el haber hecho al hombre para que pereciera. Hay muchas respuestas a este argumento. En primer lugar, se ha hallado, en la investigación científica de la Naturaleza, que la intrusión de valores estéticos o morales, ha sido siempre un obstáculo para el descubrimiento. Solía pensarse que los cuerpos celestes tenían que moverse en círculos, porque el círculo es la curva más perfecta; que las especies tenían que ser inmutables, porque Dios sólo creaba lo perfecto y, por lo tanto, no había necesidad de mejora; que no debían combatirse las epidemias como no fuera mediante el arrepentimiento, porque eran un castigo del pecado, etc. La naturaleza es indiferente a nuestros valores, y sólo puede ser entendida ignorando nuestros conceptos del bien y del mal. El universo puede tener un fin, pero nada de lo que nosotros sabemos sugiere que, de ser así, ese propósito tiene alguna semejanza con los nuestros.

Emeritus John Farrington said, "Sometimes God's creation does not yield to scientific research without great effort and our results are not always what we would like or predicted.

Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits. And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been. Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful... ...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha. It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity. 'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming.

Energetically speaking, antimatter is the mirror image of matter, so the two instantly cancel each other out if they come in contact. Keeping antimatter isolated from matter is a challenge, of course, because everything on earth is made of matter. The samples have to be stored without ever touching anything at all—even air.

En el folclore de la ciencia hay una historia muchas veces contada sobre el momento del descubrimiento: la aceleración del pulso, la luminosidad espectral que adquieren hechos comunes y corrientes, el segundo de parálisis y arrebato en que las observaciones cristalizan y encajan en patrones, como piezas de un caleidoscopio. La manzana cae del árbol. El hombre sale de un salto de la bañera. La escurridiza ecuación cuadra. Pero hay otro momento de descubrimiento -su antítesis- que se menciona contadas veces: el descubrimiento de un fracaso. Es un momento, que por lo común, el científico conoce en soledad.

Engineering is not only study of 45 subjects but it is moral studies of intellectual life.

Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7.

e seres humanos que inventam flautas, escrevem poesia, acreditam eu Deus, conquistam o Planeta e o espaço em seu redor, combatem doenças para atenuar o sofrimento, mas também não hesitam em destruir outros seres humanos para seu ganho pessoal, inventam a internet, descobrem maneiras de a transformar num instrumento de progresso e de catástrofe e, ainda por cima, se interrogam sobre as bactérias, formigas, abelhas - e si próprios.

Eva’s only fault has been the one of wanting to know more, to experiment and search with her own sources the laws of the Universe, of her own body and to refuse the teachings from “above”. Eva, basically, represents the curiosity of science against the passive acceptance that belongs to faith.

es cierto eso de que lo que existen son enfermos, y no enfermedades, y también que un psicoanalista puede llegar a combatir y eliminar los efectos del más rebelde de los complejos y no encontrar la fórmula para eliminar los propios.

Eureka!"s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals' density are few and far between, and mostly it's just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. (There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.) {A remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac, as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by Werner Heisenberg, p. 119; it is an ironic play on the Muslim statement of faith, the Shahada, often translated: 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.'}

Essentially that which is only matter, and the sciences that can, through verifiable methods, explore that which we know exists, through the means of...you know, touching, tasting, seeing, and so on...as well as using other instrumentation and so on...is very useful. The question winds up being: ultimately one of: 'Is that all there is?' And going and saying there wasn't even an understanding of matter as we understand it today prior to [...] about the time of Descartes...um, I don't know if the historical argument's the best one to make in that case. But one thing I can say is that thinking that all that exists is that which we can perceive with the five senses is in no way provable –and then if we talk about, 'Well, what is the essence of something?', then we run into a whole other mess. But if we're talking in the context of modernism, where people have gone and become wholly materialistic, the answers become incredibly simple. Incredibly simplistic. And ultimately, I'm not convinced of their accuracy; not only am I not convinced of their accuracy, but I'm not convinced that it's good for humankind in general: because ultimately we're going to wind up killing ourselves off, if all we believe in is that which is material.

Establishing yourself as a scientist takes an awfully long time. The riskiest part is learning what a true scientist is and then taking the first shaky steps down that path, which will become a road, which will become a highway, which will maybe someday lead you home. A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs.

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems.

Et peut-être la posterité me saura gré de lui avoir fait connaître que les Anciens n’ont pas tout su. (And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown that the ancients did not know everything.)

Even further, one can use a viral model for many things – it doesn't make those things a virus. For example, say that one day a prominent scientist decided to coin “moonemes” and started the “mooneme hypothesis” of cow migration. The hypothesis is all about how cows' migration patterns can be described and modelled as a “virus of the plains”, because cows move from place to place, spread, mutate, and eat all of the grass. No matter how well the model fits to cows, they are not - and will never be - obligate parasites. A view that it's a matter of personal perspective is subjectivism and hardly conducive to scientific inquiry of an objective world. It's simply not in the nature of cows any more than it is in the nature of knowledge.

Even if such beauty wasn't meant to be in a world so fallen as ours, that didn't take away from its beauty. It only made it more beautiful.

Even if the intelligent design of some structure has been established, it still is a separate question whether a wise, powerful, and beneficent God ought to have designed a complex, information-rich structure one way or another. For the sake of argument, let's grant that certain designed structures are not simply, as Gould put it, "odd" or "funny," but even cruel. What of it? Philosophical theology has abundant resources for dealing with the problem of evil, maintaining a God who is both omnipotent and benevolent in the face of evil.

Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people.

Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already. But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it. Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system.

Even the elites in developing countries know nothing about the development of calculus or electromagnetism and why, without these theoretical tools, the modern products of science would have been impossible. Indeed, appreciation and internalization of science cannot occur without the simultaneous development of a rational, modern and egalitarian system of education.