Best 107 quotes in «scientists quotes» category

If I had been born in the medieval times, my subjective union with God and the Universe would have evoked the rise of another Gnostic religion. But, by the grace of Mother Nature, I am born in an era of Science and Reasoning. Hence, I have dissected my own experience of Absolute Divinity as well as the experiences of all the religious giants in my works, in order to discover the physical truth underneath these apparently supernatural experiences.

If science could make a person understand the true significance of morality in human existence, - and more importantly, if science could enable a person to manifest his or her innate morality, then the scientists would be the least promiscuous people, and most faithful partners on earth.

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.

I have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")

I swear to Vishnu, if this doesn’t work, I’m going to stab you in the throat with a Pipette.

--Nature and nurture are inextricable; only scientists and psychologists could think otherwise, and we know all about them, don't we? --We should. We've watched them since they were tribal wizards, yelping around the campfire. ...

In recent decades, the independent scientists have amassed a huge amount of evidence of willful radiation poisoning of the masses by their own toxic corporate controlled governments.

In an emergency, save the scientists.

I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

It is now established by verifiable evidence that religion stultifies the brain and is the great obstacle in the path of intellectual progress. The more religious a person is, the more he is steeped in ignorance and superstition, the less is his sense of moral responsibility. The more intelligent a person, the less religious he is. There is an old saying that 'where there are three scientists, there are two atheists.' The countries whose governments are dominated by religion and religious institutions are the most backward. By the same token, the countries whose people are the most enlightened, and whose governments are based upon the principle of secularism—the separation of church and state—are the most progressive. And let me tell you: When man is intellectually free, the progress he will make is beyond calculation.

It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.

It’s pretty confusing.” “Good. Be confused. Confusion is where inspiration comes from.

It must be admitted that scientists today take little interest in philosophy of science.... It is not an indication that philosophical issues are no longer relevant. Rather, it is a consequence of the increasingly specialized nature of science, and of the polarization between the sciences and humanities that characterizes the modern education system.

It’s no surprise that small romances began to bubble up throughout the lab. At the time, it seemed to make sense. It wasn’t long before our working together in such close proximity, together with the general excitement of the task at hand, led to lingering glances over calorimeters, colleagues leaning in to share the dual eyepieces on comparison microscopes, the sudden, accidental brush of hands simultaneously attempting to adjust the needle valves of Bunsen burners. When we examined some of the pollen we found in Loeka’s colon, it turned out the cells within the pollen were still intact, which meant that Loeka’s death could be placed sometime during the spring. Spring!

It's peculiar to me,' she said, 'that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me--who want to die but haven't got the guts.

I will say to you what the scientists say about the small particles in the universe: I can't show you where they are, I can only show you where they were.

Look, I don't know what you are, but you're more than a geologist, if you are one at all. I've met lots of geologists on different projects like this, and they're all tiny sunburned men with fetishes for geodes. They wear floppy hats and carry baggies for soil samples around with them. ... And geologists don't make rocks disappear like you did the other night. They keep them and build little shrines to them.

Many scientists have tried to make determinism and complementarity the basis of conclusions that seem to me weak and dangerous; for instance, they have used Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to bolster up human free will, though his principle, which applies exclusively to the behavior of electrons and is the direct result of microphysical measurement techniques, has nothing to do with human freedom of choice. It is far safer and wiser that the physicist remain on the solid ground of theoretical physics itself and eschew the shifting sands of philosophic extrapolations.

Maisha ni kitu cha ajabu kuliko vyote ulimwenguni kilichowashangaza hata wanasayansi wa dunia hii. Amka na uujue ukweli.

Magic is magic as long as humans can explain it logically!

Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify

Mimi na wewe na vitu vyote ulimwenguni ni wazito kwa sababu ya 'Higgs Boson', inayojulikana pia kama 'The God’s Particle'. Wanasayansi wa CERN wamekuwa wakiitafuta 'higgs' (iliyojificha ndani ya 'higgs field') kwa zaidi ya miaka hamsini sasa, kwa bajeti ya pauni za Uingereza bilioni sita. Chembe ya 'higgs' ikipatikana itawajulisha wanasayansi jinsi ulimwengu unavyofanya kazi na jinsi ulivyoumbwa, na jibu la kitendawili cha 'Standard Model' litapatikana.

My dream was to be a scientist, but it turns out to be poetic scientific awakener.

More importantly, it is difficult to study minds because we are mental beings. We have our own minds to maintain and protect, and may not wish to discover facts that force us to change, or make us question our own being in the world, or conflict with our sense of right and wrong. We have not discussed belief systems known as religions to any extent in this book. However, particularly threatening are facts that run counter to our religious beliefs, especially if those beliefs are strongly held. Further, scientists have hopes, standards, and ethical beliefs, and they—like anybody—are not eager to find that their beliefs are invalid.

Never question the conviction of a scientist, based on mere scriptures.

Mzazi hamjui mtoto wake na mtoto hamjui mzazi wake. Kila mtu hapa duniani ni wa kipekee na wanasayansi wanatuambia kuwa tuko peke yetu hapa ulimwenguni. Lazima tujifunze kupendana na kuheshimiana.

Of ignorant people I am accustomed to consider the mere scientist the most ignorant!

Out of a single man, they get a thousand: homo economicus, homo politicus, homo physico-chimicus, homo endocrinus, homo skeletonicus, homo emotions, homo percipiens, homo libidinosus, homo peregrinans, homo ridens, homo ratiocinans, homo artifex, homo aestbeticus, homo religiosus, homo sapiens, homo historicus, homo ethnographicus, and many, many more. But at the very end of the production line in this laboratory of mine sits a Scienter who is quite unique. Three thousand brains in one. His function is to collect all the data and clarifications written up by the specialist Scienters. When he has collated everything, he is convinced that he has clasped the red rabbit or the essential man entire to his understanding. There you are, you can see him from here,' he ended, with a sign to one of his assistants who brought me a pair of binoculars. I put them to my eyes and, indeed, at the far end of the gallery, I saw the Omniscienter. There he was, an enormous cranial dome with a tiny, shapeless, crumpled face, which seemed to me to be hanging by the ears from the two ebony knobs on the back of a raised throne. Swinging to and fro beneath this head was a little cloth puppet which dangled its empty trouser legs over the crimson plush seat. His tiny right arm was kept aloft by means of a wire, and the index finger rested on his temple in the gesture of one who knows. Above the throne ran a banner bearing this inscription: I KNOW EVERYTHING, BUT I DON'T UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT

One of the most curious consequences of quantum physics is that a particle like an electron can seemingly be in more than one place at the same time until it is observed, at which point there seems to be a random choice made about where the particle is really located. Scientists currently believe that this randomness is genuine, not just caused by a lack of information. Repeat the experiment under the same conditions and you may get a different answer each time.

On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth

On why 300 years separates the first use of glass lenses in spectacles and their use in a telescope: “In many cases there are times when an invention is technologically possible – and in which it may indeed appear necessary, as the telescope may have – but without a market the idea will not sell, and in the absence of the technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will not survive.

People with a scientific mindset are analytical, open-minded, flexible and have the capacity to answer questions. They are basically focused on what they do not know, and only exceptionally on what they do know.

Science is theology for an atheist

Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.

Sayari yetu hujulikana kama Dunia na jua letu hujulikana kama Sol. Dunia imo ndani ya mfumo wa jua wa Sol. Mfumo wa jua wa Sol umo ndani ya mfumo wa jua wa Sol Sector au Solar Interstellar Neighborhood, kwenye wenzo wa Orion wa falaki ya Njiamaziwa, wenye mifumo ya jua zaidi ya 40 ikiwemo Alpha Centauri, Nemesis, Procyon na Sirius. Solar Interstellar Neighborhood imo ndani ya falaki ya Njiamaziwa yenye nyenzo nne zinazozunguka kwa pamoja na falaki nzima. Falaki ya Njiamaziwa imo ndani ya kishada (‘cluster’) chenye zaidi ya falaki 55 ikiwemo Andromeda, Leo A, M32 na Triangulum, kinachojulikanacho kama ‘the Local Galactic Group’. ‘The Local Galactic Group’ imo ndani ya mfumo wa kishada kikubwa zaidi kiitwacho Virgo Supercluster, chenye makundi zaidi ya 100 ya falaki. Virgo Supercluster imo ndani ya mfumo mwingine mkubwa zaidi wa vishada uitwao Laniakea (Local Supercluster) wenye vishada zaidi ya 500 vya falaki. Hapo ndipo mwisho wa ulimwengu wetu unaoweza kuonwa na wanasayansi wetu. Kutoka duniani mpaka Laniakea ni umbali wa kilometa bilioni trilioni 250, miaka bilioni 13.8 iliyopita.

Science is the most influential tool of progress in the world, not one among many, but most, yet no scientist had tried to use it as a primary tool for harmony. And I desired to accomplish precisely that. I didn’t want to popularize science, for there were and are already tons of scientists doing it. I wanted to use science in a way that would have direct humanitarian consequences in interhuman relationships.

Science works through replication, rectification and modification.

Scientists are sometimes wrong and fisherman are sometimes wrong.

Scientific facts alone are futile without a conscientious soul to work on them.

Science is a satisfactory curiosity.

Science is the human endeavor to elevate the self and the society from the darkness of ignorance into the light of wisdom.

Scientists want to search for alien signals because that's what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ." "Jesus Christ?" Nambodri asked, with a faintly derogatory chuckle. "Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine." "I've heard that story." "From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone's house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do.

Scientists are the true driving force of civilization.

Scientists don't make decisions based on potential profit. What a scientist must consider foremost is which of the many available paths will lead to the greatest benefit for humanity. Even if said path, doesn't result in any personal gain, it's still the one to pick. Of course, ideally, we hope that the most beneficial path also results in personal gain.

Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence. ... It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine 'truth' here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw.

That day, the great mind in neuroscience Michael A. Persinger, who is now a good friend of mine, made me realize that it was no other field of Science but Neuroscience that held the key to solving the quintessential problems of consciousness. He coaxed me into the science of the neurons and the rest as you know is history. Without Persinger, Naskar and Neuroscience would never have been linked together. Imbued with new knowledge, confidence and excessive curiosity, I officially turned my attention to one of the loftiest goals of modern science - understanding the biological nature of the human mind. That day on, I officially got into the world of Neuroscience.

Sophistication is not science people, simplicity is.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

That is why they have poets—to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

The Creator has – I say it in all reverence - drawn a myriad red herrings across the track, but the true scientist refuses to be baffled by superficial appearances in detecting the secrets of Nature. The vulgar herd catches at the gross apparent fact, but the man of insight knows what lies on the surfaces does lie.