Quotes About Science

Douglas E. Richards

Douglas E. Richards

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson

Multinational pharmaceutical companies spend many billions of dollars a year on research, and often have very little to show for it.

Sure," she mumbled. "Shoving the bulk of your machinery into higher dimensions is a real space-saver. Everyone knows that.

Einstein: His Life and Universe,

It was time to admit that his feelings for Megan would be the same, regardless of the presence or absence of the ESP curse that Kelvin Gray's experiments had brought into his life.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." —J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb upon seeing the first test detonation

Consciousness is a quantum effect. Even your scientists have begun to realize this.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." —Arthur C. Clarke

Discover Magazine (2018) "Down the Quantum Rabbit Hole: Fellow Scientists labeled him a crackpot. Now Stuart Hameroff's quantum consciousness theories are getting support from unlikely places.

Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something. A theoretical physicist like Sheldon Lee Glashow cannot afford to write in the unreadable prose of the social sciences. He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear a language as possible.

After all, in the sporting world, being discovered to have taken testosterone is ordinarily grounds to prevent someone from competing – unless, it turns out, the person is taking testosterone to transition to the opposite sex. In which case sensitivity overrides science.

For the time being the 'gay gene' remains elusive. Which is not to say that it won't be found at some point.

biology throws up certain complex and often cruel challenges.

There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds.

It is a stimulating scientific riposte to the people claiming that biological differences between the sexes do not exist. As Pinker said, 'Things are not looking good for the theory that boys and girls are born identical except for their genitalia, with all other differences coming from the way society treats them.'2 Except that less than two decades later they are. The facts are certainly on Pinker's side, but the noisier voices are not.

Worse is that we have begun trying to reorder our societies not in line with facts we know from science but based on political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences. Of

Because although Dawkins may feel that our mystery has been solved - and although science has indeed solved part of it - most of us still do not feel solved. We do not live our lives and experience our existence as solved beings. On the contrary we still experience ourselves, as our ancestors did, as tor and contradictory beings, vulnerable to aspects of ourselves and our world that we cannot understand.

Estupefactos, nos adentramos por último en el territorio más pantanoso de todos: el de quienes afirman que entre nosotros hay un número considerable de personas que viven en un cuerpo equivocado y que, por tanto, las pocas certezas que le quedaban a la sociedad (incluidas las certezas arraigadas en la ciencia y el lenguaje) deben ser reformuladas de arriba abajo.

Lo peor es que hemos tratado de reordenar nuestras sociedades, no a partir de lo que sabemos gracias a la ciencia, sino de falsedades políticas patrocinadas por los activistas de las ciencias sociales.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man. —Bertrand Russell

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science. —Lord Kelvin (1824–1907),