Quotes About Science

People want electrons to orbit atoms like tiny planets, hard and regular. They make sense that way. People like that....they don't want their electrons to exist only as a cloud of potentialities. But that's what we've got now, and we're stuck with it. Quantum mechanics isn't going to roll over and die as easily as God did.

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a scientific hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. Reason became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.

The unexpected aristocratic dissenter of 1917, Lord Lansdowne, was entirely right to see that the war had irrevocably unleashed "the prostitution of science for purposes of pure destruction.

And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections. And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections. And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections.

Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. Neither race nor racism has foundations in science. It is our duty to contest the warping of scientific research, especially if it is being used to justify prejudice. If you are a racist, then you are asking for a fight. But science is my ally, not yours, and your fight is not just with me, but with reality.

We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.

Scientific racism' or 'race science' are both misnomers. These are pseudoscientific domains.

It behoves us all to confront racism wherever we find it, especially when it is covert or normalised in stereotypes and myth, and science is a weapon in that contest. The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that 'in a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

One day the fighter pilot guided from the ground will chase, at supersonic speed, the atom-bomb carrier for scores of miles high up in the stratosphere. But science must not become an aim in itself. Only the spirit of attack borne in a brave heart will bring a success to any fighter aircraft, no matter how highly developed it may be.

And when the moon is full and there's a lot of light, it overpowers the sparkle of the stars, so you think they're gone. But they're there. In science, the only concept you can prove is that things always change. But the truth is, they also stay the same.

Two thousand scientists in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well-organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have long since produced a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.

The motor of our ingenuity is the question 'Does it have to be like this?', from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books.

Science should matter to us not only because it helps us to control parts of the world, but also because is shows us things that we will -never- master. [...] Nightly - perhaps after the main news bulletin and before the celebrity quiz - we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. [...] majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart.

what effacement of the individual ego, a life in science now entailed.

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

He considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence.

Today's science is yesterday's magic, friend Oak. Today's magic is tomorrow's science. All disciplines are tangent and the differences between them often nothing more substantial than semantics. Scientists or laibon who dismiss conclusions out of hand because they do not countenance the methodology utilized to reach them forfeit their title.

Why did you let the alien survive inside Kane?' The science officer scowled. 'I'm not sure you're getting through to me. Nobody "let" anything survive inside anybody. It just happened.

Remember that the prime consideration of science is the protection and betterment of human life. I would never contravene that.

In discovering that half of his biological heritage consisted of nothing more than an impersonal concoction of designer proteins, artificially leveraged by indifferent scientists to produce a zygote that when matured would, they hoped, display certain interesting mental abilities, he had felt something fundamental drain out of him. He had been nothing more than a test, an experiment, one among many.

Biological traces are acceptable," Hux murmured, "but a couple of skulls would be better.

The point is that if the knowledge that provides the categories we use to describe our observations is defective, the observation statements that presuppose those categories are similarly defective.

It would seem that the scientific revolution involved not just a progressive transformation of scientific theory, but also a transformation in what were considered to be the observable facts!