Quotes About Science

What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours.

Science is a cosy, friendly club of specialists who follow their numerous different stars; it is proud and wonderfully productive but never certain and always hampered by the persistence of incomplete world views.

We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science.

The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science.

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

What can be explained can also be predicted, if one knows the initial events and the laws covering their succession.

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion.

Our world is now so complex, our technology and science so powerful, and our problems so global and interconnected that we have come to the limits of individual human intelligence and individual expertise.

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

On the contrary, to know that you are an individual not put here for some mysterious reason by some supernatural means, and that you are not protected by unknown powers or beings; to know that you are a product of millions of experiments in the evolutionary process and not the result of a seed thrown on this planet by extraterrestrials—that, to me, is very exciting.

If we consider the scale of the universe, we begin to see just how ridiculous belief in astrology can be.

this sudden appearance of Homo sapiens is attributable to the rapid mutation of only seventeen brain-building genes. A scant few, really.

that and throughout the Civil War, this single building housed the entirety of the Smithsonian's collections. But where did this shining testament to science get its true start? Oddly enough, it wasn't an American who founded the institution

superbolide meteors, averaging seventeen to twenty meters across. They each struck with the energy equivalent of eight atomic bombs.

I am a collector of bread crumbs, all those bits of science and history that I mash and knead together to build my stories. And now that the bread is baked and served, my goal here is to try to separate those slices of the story that are based on substantial fact from those that are pure fabrication.

Museum of Jurassic Technology.

the pace of our ability to read and write DNA increases tenfold every year.

thousand years ago the average life expectancy of mankind was only twenty-five years. It took another nine hundred years to extend that to thirty-seven. Today the average is seventy-eight. So, in the past hundred years, we more than doubled life expectancy. That

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." —Arthur C. Clarke, 1962, from his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination

Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.

Bad science, maybe… but personally gratifying.

Lightning does not come from underground

As everybody knows, money is getting very short in Britain, university departments are closing, all kinds of studies are being cut. This type of a science has been badly affected, often the first to be cut -- yet I have just read that in various universities, departments studying psychology, social science and so forth have been reprieved, because of their usefulness to industry. In other words, they are proving their value where it counts.

I think you might come to forget, too, that life is more than a science.