Quotes About Science

We cannot experimentally map out the brain. It's just too big. In a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead there are 3,000 pathways like a city with 3,000 streets.

No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang.

We cannot explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing without general relativity, and this is where MOND spectacularly fails.

I wanted to repeat we cannot vote confidence at any point on a confidence motion in a government that fails to have a climate target that's ground in science and consistent with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we must do.

You can be only a modest distance away from the gravity brane, and gravity will be incredibly weak.

The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

Pitching is both an art and a science.

I have friends who are science journalists, and I'm seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they're pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology.

I'm an optimist. My own fiction, while it has its own dark warnings about pitfalls ahead, depicts the potential of science to improve society by networking human minds.

Early on, when you're working in a new area of science, you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn't, and, even worse, leading others to believe it.

I think Pixar's done an amazing job integrating art and science. They really get this idea that art and engineering work side by side.

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand how all the big cosmetics companies get away with the placebo science and unscientific claims.

There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.

Whenever you say you're a physicist, there's a certain fraction of people who immediately go, 'Oh, I hated physics in high school.' That's because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams.

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

The planet's hope and salvation lies in the adoption of revolutionary new knowledge being revealed at the frontiers of science.

A carbon nanotube is just a graphene sheet that's rolled up seamlessly, and this happens in nature; carbon nanotubes are found in mineral deposits around the planet.

My field is called planetary science.

I'm an astrobiologist, and I come from a planetary science background, so in a very broad sense, I study the evolution of planetary environments.

I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy - galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy - is really cool stuff, but to me, it's about destinations.

I'm an avid watcher of the Nat Geo channel, where I watch shows about how the planets are formed, and shows about moons, quasars, black holes.

Planetary missions are great, but they're usually only brief snapshots of those planets and also really very close-up.

I'd like to jump a couple hundred years into the future and work with the scientists who are getting back the first information from our probes to planets orbiting nearby stars.

55 Cancri is extraordinarily rich in heavy elements and extraordinarily efficient at making planets - much more so than our sun - and those elements are the very ones you need to make planets that aren't just gas giants.