Quotes About Science

The protein wrap is known as a capsid. The

The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.

Around 1840, a German anatomist named Jakob Henle began to suspect the existence of noxious particles—creatures or things—that were too small to be seen with a light microscope and yet able to transmit specific diseases.

With our virus, people like to say, they'll say, 'Oh, you study that virus that causes the insect to explode!' Like, the virus doesn't cause the insect to explode," he insisted. "It causes it to melt.

A plate of Ebola virions mixed with Hendra virions would resemble capellini in a light sauce of capers.

scrum of paramyxovirus, containing long filaments with a sort

But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.

molecular phylogenetics.

More precisely, he placed the most recent common ancestor of DRC60 and ZR59 in the year 1908, give or take a margin of error.

Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.

disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.

What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.

the same day Stephen Schneider assured the subcommittee that "there is virtually no scientific controversy" over the contention that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will produce higher temperatures. "That's not a speculative theory," he said.

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.

The white powder of gold stuff?" Cam asked. "Yes. I was in the lab all night working with it.

When the Templars came back from the Middle East, they brought back all this knowledge that had been lost in Europe during the Dark Ages. Medicine, science, astronomy, architecture, cartography. The Church hated it.

The Templars were Christians, sure, but they also venerated Mother Nature and the stars and the seasons. Whereas the Church wanted nothing to do with nature. They saw science and medicine and astronomy as challenges to their doctrines. They wanted people to have faith, not knowledge.

Occam's Razor: The simplest theory is usually the correct one." He

the ideas presented in this book culminate a century of research questioning the calorie balance model of obesity, and represent a fundamentally different way to understand why we gain weight and what we can do about it.7

In a sense, the calorie balance view of obesity is like considering fever a problem of heat balance. It's technically not wrong, but also not very helpful.

Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.

Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it ambivalence: a collision between thought and feeling.

The presence of religion in science fiction is hardly surprising given its tendency to question limits and boundaries, and what could be more challenging than the limitation of mortality itself?

One of the most recurrent themes in science fiction is its examination of humanity's relation to its own material constructions, sometimes to celebrate progress, sometimes in a more negative spirit of what Isaac Asimov has repeatedly described as technophobia, through fictions articulating fears of human displacement.