Quotes from Jim Al-Khalili

As the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body.

For me, I think the greatest achievements of science is to allow humanity to realize that our world is comprehensible. Through science, rational thinking, we can understand how the universe works.

classical Arabic, being the language of the Qur'an, has not changed at all in fourteen centuries, making the writings of the early Islamic scholars as accessible today as they were then.

For me, I think the greatest achievements of science is to allow humanity to realize that our world is comprehensible. Through science, rational thinking, we can understand how the universe works.

The difference between my beliefs and having a religious faith is that I am prepared to change my views in light of new evidence, but someone of a religious faith will just stick their fingers in the ears and say: 'I'm not listening, there's nothing you can say that will make me change my mind.

Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed, it was driven by the need of early scholars to interpret the Qur'an.

The trustworthiness of science comes not from certainty, but from its very openness about its uncertainty, always calling into question what we currently understand and being prepared to replace that knowledge with a deeper understanding if something better comes along. In other walks of life, this attitude might be regarded as fickle. But not in science. Scientific progress depends on scientists' unwavering commitment to the qualities of honesty and doubt.

I shall mention in passing just one example of a gift from the Arabs that I for one am rather grateful for: coffee -- especially as it was originally banned in Europe as a 'Muslim drink.

It is not surprising that Ibn Sina is a national icon in Iran today, and one can find countless schools and hospitals named after him in many countries around the world. Indeed, his legacy stretches even further, for there is an 'Avicenna' crater on the moon, and in 1980 every member country of Unesco celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of Ibn Sina's birth. As a philosopher he is referred to as the Aristotle of Islam; as a physician he is known as the Galen of Islam.

In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain.

Perhaps death represents the severing of the living organism's connection with the orderly quantum realm, leaving it powerless to resist the randomizing forces of thermodynamics.

One cannot, therefore, understand Arabic science without considering the extent to which Islam influenced scientific and philosophical thought. Arabic science was, throughout its golden age, inextricably linked to religion. Clearly, the scientific revolution of the Abbasids would not have taken place if it were not for Islam, incontrast to the spread of Christianity over the preceding centuries, which had nothink like the same effect in stimulation and encouraging original scientific thinking.

His (Islamic astronomer al-Farghani) legacy also endures through the Italian writer and poet Dante (1265-1321), who derived most of the astronomical knowledge he included in his DIVINE COMEDY from the writings of al-Farghani (whom he referred to by his Latin name, Alfraganus).

I suspect that if aliens did come to Earth, it would be as researchers: biologists, anthropologists, linguists, keen to understand the peculiar workings of life on Earth, to meet humanity and learn of our art, music, culture, languages, philosophies and religions.

Careful observation and a questioning attitude to findings are central to the scientific method of investigation, which underpins physics and all the sciences.

the domain of quantum world is so astonishingly strange that it even makes tales of alien abductions sound perfectly reasonable

By thinking about what we don't yet know, we can think about how we can best find out. It is the many questions we have asked over the course of our human history that have given us an ever-more-accurate picture of the world we know and love.

the site still radiated a powerful aura that whispered of past glories too ancient for me to comprehend.

As the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body.

The advantage of a quantum walk over a classical random walk can be appreciated by returning to our slow-moving drunk and imagining that the bar he leaves has sprung a leak and that water is pouring out of its door.

It has been argued that the spontaneous emergence of life on Earth would have been such a rare event that it is the equivalent of a strong wind blowing through a junkyard and, from the materials there, creating an entire jumbo jet, by accident. That, the argument goes on, is how likely it would be for organic molecules to fit together through chance alone in just the right combination to make even the most basic life forms—quite an amazing level of coincidence

collect and compare the genome sequences of viruses or bacteria collected from patients. At the start of the Ebola epidemic in 2014, this process took weeks; by the end, field teams could sequence viruses in hours on a device the size of a USB stick.

Time doesn't flow at the same rate for everyone. You can change time. You can slow it down, you can speed it up.

Nothing is everywhere. Our Earth is merely a tiny speck of dust floating through a vast expanse of utterly silent inhospitable void.