Quotes About Science

Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas—than quantum mechanics.

A substantial fraction of the atoms in the body of a typical physicist were once in the form of pizza.)

It doesn't include math or logic, nor does it address issues of judgment, such as aesthetics or morality. Science has a simple goal: to figure out what the world actually is. Not all the possible ways it could be, nor the particular way it should be. Just what it is. There's

If you believe that the atoms that are inside your brain and your body act differently because they are in a living person than if they were in a rock or a crystal, then what you're saying is that the laws of physics are wrong.

There is a wide gap between admitting that we don't know everything about how the mind works and remembering that whatever it does, it needs to be compatible with the laws of nature.

So neurons talk to each other by squirting electrically charged molecules from the axon of one to a dendrite on another.

Historically, nature has been very good at surprising us.

If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it.

Don't play Quantum Russian Roulette.

The strength of the electromagnetic interaction, for example, is fixed by a number called the "fine-structure constant," a famous quantity in physics that is numerically close to 1/137.

Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand–born experimental physicist who was as responsible as anyone for discovering the structure of the atom, once remarked that "all of science is either physics or stamp collecting.

That's how science works. We don't "prove" results like we can in mathematics or logic; we simply add to their plausibility by accumulating more and more evidence.

If we pretend that the emission of gravitational waves were the only thing affecting the Earth's orbit, it would take over 1023 years for it to crash into the sun. So perhaps the same thing is true for atoms: maybe electron orbits aren't really stable, but they're stable enough.

Everything we want to think about human beings has to be compatible with the nature and behavior of the pieces of which we are made, even if those pieces don't tell the whole story. Understanding what those particles and fields are and how they interact with one another is a crucial part of comprehending what it means to be human.

The best evidence that time travel is impossible is the fact that we haven't been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.

Did you know that the Stegosaurus lived further away from the Tyrannosaurus Rex than we are from the Tyrannosaurus Rex in time?

I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.

It's time to let science and medicine, not politics and rhetoric, lead us to good, sound policy.

I had drawings that were the first time that mathematics was put into visual form.

I'm in this wonderful position where I can do what interests me. And whatever comes along that interests me, I do. The rest of the time I bother scientists about communicating.

The principle that light can be in two places at the same time is absolutely extraordinary.

Who would have thought around 1900 that in fifty years time we would know so much more and understand so much less.

Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time.