Quotes About Science

Douglas E. Richards

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge." —Rod Serling, excerpted from The Twilight Zone, opening narration, season one

Brilliant minds around the world are working to enhance the addictive properties of numerous products.

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine." —Neil deGrasse Tyson

The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom." This is measured by atomic clocks that are accurate to within one second over a period of fifteen billion years—roughly the age of the universe.

four years to reach the nearest star.

you take two radioactive atoms, absolutely identical in every conceivable way, they will decay randomly. The first might decay immediately, while the second doesn't do the same for an hour or more. Why the difference? After all, they're identical. Scientists have never found any way to explain it, or predict when this decay will occur.

The human body harbored ten times more bacteria than it had cells of its own. In fact, more than thirty times as many bacteria could be found in an ounce of fecal matter than there were humans in the world.

We've all heard Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote by now," said Hoyer. "It's become so common, I think they're printing it on fortune cookies. But it's also true." "You mean, 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'?" said Reed.

Douglas E. Richards

The word dark is a misnomer, since it implies that lack of light is the problem, that if you could just shine a flashlight on dark matter you could see it. But this stuff can't be detected by our current science. Period.

Most cosmologists agree that dark matter and dark energy make up ninety-five percent of the universe. The parts we can detect, the hundreds of billions of galaxies filled with hundreds of billions of stars and planets, represent only five percent of the total.

Douglas E. Richards

About 98% of the atoms in the human body are renewed each year. This surprising fact is discussed by Dr. Paul C. Aebersold of Oak Ridge in the latest Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Aebersold based his conclusion on experiments with radioisotopes, which trace the movements of chemical elements in and out of the body.

In 1944, an experiment was conducted that should have conclusively proven that DNA was actually the carrier of the genetic code, but these results were resisted and largely ignored. Scientists had convinced themselves that DNA was too simple to be the conductor of the orchestra, and clung to this belief. Again, once consensus is reached, it isn't easily overcome,

This supercoiling is nature's way of fitting three billion base pairs of DNA inside a microscopic cell. If you uncoiled the DNA in a single cell and stretched it out, it would be over six feet long.

Computers were once bigger than houses. When this was the case, abuse was virtually nonexistent. A current example is the large hadron collider. We certainly don't have to worry about one of these being misused, simply because there is only one of these.

Douglas E. Richards

Douglas E. Richards

Also, I'll want to scan your brain using the ultra-high-resolution MRI at our main facility. I need to confirm Kelvin's data as to the final positioning of your implants.

anything I've ever done. This makes string theory look as simple as addition.

many believe that consciousness itself is a quantum effect.

Or, as the great physicist Freeman Dyson observed, 'The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

there are four fundamental forces in nature that we know of. Electromagnetism, which everyone knows about. The weak nuclear force, which makes possible the fusion that powers the sun. And the strong nuclear force, which basically holds the nuclei of atoms together." "I'll