Quotes About Science

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.

Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?

Scientists say that it is impossible for any life to exist deep underground, that the Earth is solid through and through. However, at this point in time, no scientist has actually ever been far enough underground to prove their theories.

I sort of feel that climate change will be solved by science. I just feel instinctively that we will find a way of saving ourselves. But I am less confident that we won't destroy ourselves in other ways.

A newborn enters REM sleep immediately after falling asleep. By about three months of age she will enter non-REM first, a pattern that will continue for the rest of her life.

The term circadian rhythms refers to biological cycles that repeat about every twenty-four hours.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

If you are a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, or musician, or if your creativity is a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law, or some other profession, you are a member.

You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.

Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.

The great museums may harbour the conscience for the natural world, not merely provide its catalogue.

There is no final truth in palaeontology. Every new observer brings something of his or her own: a new technique, a new intelligence, even new mistakes. The past mutates. The scientist is on a perpetual journey into a past that can never be fully known, and there is no end to the quest for knowledge.

My contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself--for money.

Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn Jr

For the scientist the analytical process does not diminish the splendour of what he or she sees. Every detail added is an extra stanza added to a great epic poem, one that is never complete, nor yet ever tedious in its particulars

There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.

A relação da medicina com o charlatanismo é a mesma da astronomia com a astrologia. O que as estrelas predizem para os leitores de jornais é inofensivo, mas o lançamento de um ônibus espacial ou de um satélite, orientado pela astrologia, ao invés da astronomia, seria desastroso. Mas a humanidade sofre de uma fascinação eterna pelos charlatães. Talvez porque todos nós gostemos de pensar que sabemos mais do que nossos médicos.

2. We can't do evidence-based policy without evidence.

There's no better way to build confidence in a theory than to believe it is not testable.

From these early attempts to explain things slowly came philosophy as well as our present science. Not that science explains "why" things are as they are - gravitation does not explain why things fall - but science gives so many details of "how" that we have the feeling we understand "why." Let us be clear about this point; it is by the sea of interrelated details that science seems to say "why" the universe is as it is.

Fundamentalists didn't try to disprove science. They didn't argue against it. They pronounced against it! It was the equivalent of a parent clinching an argument with a child by shouting: 'because I say so'. That's what fundamentalist religion does. It refutes not by evidence but by authority. Why is Darwin wrong? Because the Bible says so! But they did more than pontificate. They tried to ban science itself. That's

Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer. HUMPHRY DAVY

Glaisher emphasised the particular scientific virtues required by ballooning: meticulous care and accuracy, calmness and detachment, stoic self-discipline; and a kind of spiritual openness to the wonders of Creation.

The cool feats of our scientific men are known to us all – such as that of Sir Humphry Davy inhaling a particular gas with an accurate report every minute or two of its successive effects upon his brain and sense.