Quotes About Science

Dr. Duncan MacDougall, Haverhill, once attempted to prove that the human soul had weight by placing dying patients on a giant scale at the exact moment of death. Believe it or not, at the exact moment of death, there was a slight decrease in weight.

There are no genuinely blue foods. Foods that appear blue such as blueberries are often a shade of purple.

There are actually some women in the world with four color receptor cells in their eyes, which can allow them to see 100 million colors. To put that into perspective for you, a typical human only has three color receptors and can only see about one million colors.

The reason men have nipples is because all embryos start off as females in the womb.

My dad was an engineer and so I had this picture of science and technology and pursuits of the mind as being more impressive than artistic pursuits, which I saw a as kind of frivolous.

Q: Why do bees have sticky hair? A: Because they use honeycombs.

Q: How do you embarrass an archaeologist? A: Give him a used tampon and ask him which period it came from.

Chien was careful to avoid debates over science and faith. To him, wonder was wonder and did not require further complications.

And just what is the nature of things?" "It's beyond us. Not to be understood. The sun blows a fuse here and shoots energy there, and here's this small ball of rock minding its own business ninety-three-million miles away and suddenly it's all turned upside down. The natural law gets rewritten and even the science goes to shit. Along comes a new science. New creatures, new people.

What an expensive and needless mess. You could probably find a cure for cancer in a year if you just reassigned all the smart people who are now working on this artificially created and otherwise useless problem.

Weapons of mass destruction aren't pulled out of a black hat like a white rabbit at a magic show. They're produced in factories. There's science and technology involved. They're not produced in a hole in the ground or in a basement.

The problem began with his telomeres. What is a telomere? Picture the little plastic bits on the end of your shoelaces. Imagine each time you tie your shoes, you have to clip off a little bit of that plastic part to get it to go through the lace holes. After you've done this enough times, the plastic tip is gone and the shoelace starts to unravel. Once the laces unravel enough, it's impossible to tie your shoes, and you walk around looking like a goober.

Studies of the DSM-II found that when two psychiatrists consulted the same patient, they gave the same DSM diagnosis only between 32 and 42 percent of the time. Rates of consistency have improved since then, but the diagnosis of many mental disorders remains, despite pretensions to the contrary, more art than science.b

bitter fights over revisions for the DSM-V—which have included public denunciations of it by the chairmen of the task forces that produced the DSM-III and DSM-IV, respectively—suggest that psychiatric diagnosis may be more a matter of politics and marketing than either art or science. c

When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.

As delightful as the Just So explanations are of how spots, stripes, humps and horns came to be, biology can now tell us stories about butterflies, zebras and leopards that I contend are every bit as enchanting as Kipling's fairy tales. What's more, they offer some simple, elegant truths that deepen our understanding of all animal forms, including ourselves.

But in just the past hundred years or so, we have turned the tables and taken control of biology. Smallpox, a virus that killed as many as 300 million people in the first part of the twentieth century (far more than in all wars combined) has not merely been tamed but has been eradicated from the planet.

Darwin's great advantage over Paley and other thinkers of his generation was his grasp of the immensity of time. His

I believe that the teaching of evolution and science is best served by promoting the scientific method and scientific knowledge and not by attacking religious views. The latter is a futile, counterproductive batte. However, I also believe, as many denominations have also concluded, that religion is better served by promoting and evolving its respective teachings and theologies, and not by attacking science, which is definitely a losing strategy

The world is not magic — and that's the most magical thing about it.

At heart, science is the quest for awesome - the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It's a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives.

As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable.

Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, once offered the opinion that "life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.

If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can't turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?