Best 9669 quotes in «science quotes» category

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words 'Thus it plainly appears', I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.

When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There’s a drawing on it. A drawing of the ‘light-filled box’ in Einstein’s thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt

When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.

Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity, chance, and design... To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably be referred to either regularity or chance.

Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her - the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.

Whenever someone is a threat to the enemy there will be an attack dispatched against that person to try to minimise their effectiveness.

Whenever the fame and the fury became too oppressive, Jesus found peace speaking to his Father among trees. If Jesus is our teacher, model, and savior, then we should follow his example. When we are tired, when we are discouraged, when we are frustrated, when we are downcast, we need to do what Jesus did: seek solace in the woods. Go to the forest, sit under the trees, and pray. There, beneath the canopy of shade-giving branches, we, like Jesus, can be still and know God (Psalm 46:10).

Whenever you are in transition it is always important to choose the words that you use. You call it crises in your life and I call it transition.

When everything goes wrong, it’s better to remember someone who is not going to question you or blame you for what you have done. Not even offer some free advice. That’s the best thing about God.

When fully united, without ego or weakness, we become the greatest invisible force this world has ever witnessed.

When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard by which to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of events of the day, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text.

When God communed with these ancient writers, He did not inform them that the seat of emotion is actually the brain rather than the innards. God is infinitely wise, and His reasons for not correcting the ancients' physiological knowledge can only be speculated upon. One may postulate that to revise the ancients' entire understanding of science was superfluous to the purpose and message God had for these people. God did not feel the need to update their scientific knowledge—perhaps because God felt no need to do so, or perhaps to do so would have bewildered them and made them suspicious of this God who knew nothing of their 'correct' science.

When human life lay foul for all to see Upon the earth, crushed by the burden of religion, Religion which from heaven’s firmament Displayed its face, its ghastly countenance, Lowering above mankind, the first who dared Raise mortal eyes against it, first to take His stand against it, was a man of Greece. He was not cowed by fables of the gods Or thunderbolts or heaven’s threatening roar, But they the more spurred on his ardent soul Yearning to be the first to break apart The bolts of nature’s gates and throw them open. Therefore his lively intellect prevailed And forth he marched, advancing onwards far Beyond the flaming ramparts of the world, And voyaged in mind throughout infinity, Whence he victorious back in triumph brings Report of what can be and what cannot And in what manner each thing has a power That’s limited, and deep-set boundary stone. Wherefore religion in its turn is cast Beneath the feet of men and trampled down, And us his victory has made peers of heaven.

When I call on God, I am not trying to get his attention and I am not trying to get Him to notice me. In all this my journey with Him two questions usually comes to my mind, they are; am I paying attention to him or am I trying to get his attention?

When I look at the night sky, I'm overwhelmed by the enormity of the universe. But this doesn't make me question my significance in God's eyes, no. Instead, it makes me drop to my knees in awe of God. If God created all of this, how powerful must He be to be able to manage and sustain all of it? God has to have enormous power to manage the entire cosmos. How mighty must He be to hold this massive universe in the palm of His hand?

When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.

When I saw the kouros for the first time," he said, "I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.

When I reflect on my time working for the W. M. Keck Observatory, Columbia University and Dartmouth College, my memories are not of brilliant minds advancing science, but rather of shady people damaging their workers health in order to obtain tainted astronomical data.

When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase 'Man's Place in Nature,' it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin's theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been published only four years before, and the thesis that man was literally a part of nature, rather than an earthy vessel charged with some sublimer stuff, was so novel and so offensive to current metaphysics that it needed the most vigorous defense. Half the civilized world was rudely shocked, the other half skeptically amused. Nearly a century has passed since the Origin shattered the complacency of the Victorian world and initiated what may be called the Darwinian revolution, an upheaval of man's ideas comparable to and probably exceeding in significance the revolution that issued from Copernicus's demonstration that the earth moves around the sun. The theory of evolution was but one of many factors contributing to the destruction of the ancient beliefs; it only toppled over what had already been weakened by centuries of decay, rendered suspect by the assaults of many intellectual disciplines; but it marked the beginning of the end of the era of faith.

When in a little corner on a tiny blue dot, deep under the ocean, in a very special spot... an itty bitty thing woke up anew and came alive. I tell you, it's true!

When it comes to established environmental science, President Trump is like a bull in a china shop.

When it comes to our embedded beliefs, our relative intolerance to ambiguous and contrary information leads us in many instances to ignore or less thoroughly process incoming data for its actual truth value. It is for this reason that society at large is so prone to religiosity because taking a skeptical stance is the difficult path; it is the path of greatest cognitive load. The cognitive load is high because we have to conscientiously work to continually question the information we receive and often re-program our subconscious for a subject matter that is both complex and abstract. More simply stated, it is cognitively easy for people to attribute perplexing phenomena to an abstract, all-powerful deity than it is to engage in a rigorous examination to discern potential explanatory data.

When I started training myself in Neurobiology, Psychology and Theology, mostly on the streets of Calcutta, at the book kiosks on the sidewalk, for I had no money to buy the books, I had no academic background - no college degree - no potential for earning a decent living - I was a direction-less canoe in the open sea. I did not come from a rich or learned family, nor did I have rich friends, so, as far as everybody else was concerned, my life was doomed. I come from the humblest of origins - like did Ramanujan, like did Tesla, like did many more legendary thinkers of human history. I didn't know the rules of academia - I didn't know the laws and the norms of the scientific community - all I knew was that I had to understand the humans if I were to unite them. Other than that, I had no clue to my future. I learnt by failing - I learnt by making errors - I learnt by moving slowly but surely, and by never losing my sense of awe. And that's really what science is about - it's about naivety, curiosity and awe.

When it comes to Steven Magee versus the 1.4 billion dollar Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea, the established biological science on the toxicity of very high altitudes to summit workers is on Magee’s side.

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field.

When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.

When I was growing up it was still acceptable—not to me but in social terms—to say that one was not interested in science and did not see the point in bothering with it. This is no longer the case. Let me be clear. I am not promoting the idea that all young people should grow up to be scientists. I do not see that as an ideal situation, as the world needs people with a wide variety of skills. But I am advocating that all young people should be familiar with and confident around scientific subjects, whatever they choose to do. They need to be scientifically literate, and inspired to engage with developments in science and technology in order to learn more. A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it. I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.

When I was young, I thought it was thunder that kills people. But when I learnt physics in St. Paul's High School, I discovered that it is rather the lightning that does the killing. The voice of the thunder itself is just a noise. The lightning is the poise. I learnt to take the course of my life, not by violence but rather with intelligence.

When my intelligence increases, my belief in any religion decreases.

When looking for evidence that something exists, it's silly to start by assuming that it is impossible. Taking any assumptions into study is bad science.

When nature and human beings become natural resources and human resources, the process of abstraction and exploitation has already begun.

[W]hen one has a religious experience, what is 'true' is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality. To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science.

When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at random. [Nevertheless,] a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence [shows] that this conception alone is compatible with the facts.

When Orson Welles said "We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone", he was mistaken. Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis - a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonised by microbes while they are still unfertilized eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right - a colony enclosed within a single body. A mutli-species collective. An entire world.

When one day Lagrange took out of his pocket a paper which he read at the Académe, and which contained a demonstration of the famous Postulatum of Euclid, relative to the theory of parallels. This demonstration rested on an obvious paralogism, which appeared as such to everybody; and probably Lagrange also recognised it such during his lecture. For, when he had finished, he put the paper back in his pocket, and spoke no more of it. A moment of universal silence followed, and one passed immediately to other concerns.

When religion ceases to be speculative and becomes factual and "true", it will become science. Science can be used to prove or disprove opinions, beliefs and accusations. Until any religion crosses that line, who is anyone to use their religion to judge others?

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them.

When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction

When reeling a fish in to not simply feel “the power of wildness intimately but the same time recognize the right of that wildness to continue”.

When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. When it is deficient, they don't.

When the farmer bores the tap hole into the trunk, the tree sends sap to heal the wound. Sure enough, by the next spring, only an extremely observant and knowledgeable person can find the old tap scars. When the wind blows, the tree senses that a branch might break. A broken branch is a much more serious wound than a little clean tap hole in the trunk. Therefore, the tree withholds the sap from the tap hole in case it needs to rush a bunch of sap to a broken limb somewhere. Once the wind subsides, the sap starts flowing again through the little tap hole. Sentient beings, anyone? You bet. Fearfully and wonderfully made.

When The Pyramid falls, the other cities will follow in short order. Nature's balance will be restored and Man will finally return to solitude.

When there are over 211,000 homicide cases since 1980 that still remain unsolved in America, and the same scientists who claim that they can determine that the earth is 4.5 billion years old can’t solve them, I’d say that’s good verification that their assessments of evolution are mere assumption.

When scientists are unable to explain a certain phenomenon, it does not prove that the phenomenon belongs in the paranormal domain. It means that we need more data and we need to carry out more analyses. If you ask a five-year old to define calculus, and the kid has no idea what you are talking about, it does not mean that calculus is something supernatural. It means that the kid’s brain needs to grow further in order to comprehend calculus. The same goes for various unexplained phenomena of the world.

When someone dismissively answers “Of course a tree makes a sound if no one’s nearby,” they are merely demonstrating their inability to ponder an event nobody attended. They’re finding it too difficult to take themselves out of the equation. They somehow continue to imagine themselves present when they are absent.

When the conscience runs pure and strong in the heart of thinking humanity, there is not power in any fundamentalism to take hold of the human civilization and drag it back to the medieval days of barbarianism.

When stuck in middle of a choice, we always do what we must. Do things we think is right. We are actually never get stuck. We just love to feel stuck.

When the mind is infested with more judgement, conclusions and biases, than the actual urge for understanding, even the sun appears to be a candle and the ocean a pool.

When the neglect is severe, the patient may behave almost as if one half of the universe had abruptly ceased to exist in any meaningful form.... Patients with unilateral neglect behave not only as if nothing were actually happening in the left hemispace, but also as if nothing of any importance could be expected to occur there.

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.