Quotes About Science

LET'S JUST HOPE WE ACCIDENTALLY BUILD GOD.

It's so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that 'the world' is mundanely 'a planet.' The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project.

Chronotropic Drugs: Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

Claire put scientifically enhanced popcorn in the microwave oven. I never feel like I'm putting food in one of these things, she then says, entering with beeps, the time-set into the LED. It feels more like I'm inserting fuel rods into a core.

The twentieth century showed us the evil face of physics. This century will show us the evil face of biology.

Launches the reader into a story of science and ancient mystery that will blow your mind: [From New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston]

If this sounds like strange talk from a scientist—so be it. If there is one thing I have learned from a lifetime study of science, it is that the world is not a place we human beings will ever comprehend. Understand, yes; comprehend, no.

The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

number 118, oganesson. That element was only confirmed in 2002, and it lasts for just one five-hundredth of a second before decaying into something else.

Douglas Preston

There may be no better use of taxpayer dollars than in funding the NIH; it is a shining example of something our government does extremely well

A humane research environment for chimpanzees is very, very expensive. I'm sure Miller would have been much happier if we'd locked all the chimps in four-by-five cages. When we lost our funding, we had to shut down the project immediately. This was a terrible loss to science. I can't even begin to tell you. But it also affected Jennie. It was the beginning of the end.

Mitochondrial DNA is completely separate from a person's regular DNA. It's a bit of genetic material residing in the mitochondria of every cell in the body, and it is inherited unchanged from generation to generation, through the female line. That means all the descendants—male and female—of a particular woman will have identical mitochondrial DNA, which we call mtDNA. This kind of DNA is extremely useful in forensic work, and separate databases are kept of it.

Occam's razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

We live in a nation of ignoramuses. The average American knows nothing about science. A man asked me once if the stars went away when the sun rose, or if they were still there but you just couldn't see them. He was a stockbroker I had the misfortune of employing, a man who made over one hundred thousand dollars a year! Well, I took my investments away from him, damn quick! And then the market climbed five hundred points.

So, after half a million, what did the chimps say?" Well, not much, when you really analyze it. That wasn't the point, for God's sake! And the scientists who supported us were afraid to object. They didn't want to attract Proxmire's attention. Cowards, every one.

It is a capital mistake to develop a premature hypothesis in the absence of hard data.

Nobody believes in magicians any more, nobody believes that anyone can come along and wave a wand and turn you into a frog. But if you read in the paper that by injecting certain glands scientists can alter your vital tissues and you'll develop froglike characteristics, well, everybody would believe that.

Archaeologists only look at what lies beneath their feet. The sky and the heavens don't exist for them.

Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.

The supernatural seems supernatural. But the science of tomorrow is the supernatural of today.

It is romantic, you know, the transatlantic telephone. To speak so easily to someone nearly halfway across the globe. The telegraphed photograph - that, too, is romantic. Science is the greatest romance there is.

He had high blood pressure," said Molly. "But surely there are things one takes nowadays—some kind of pill. Science is so wonderful.

It has always seemed to me so extraordinary that a woman should go so far in the scientific world. I should have thought a purely masculine brain was needed for such work.