Quotes About Science

Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room.

MODERN SCIENTIFIC CAPABILITY has profoundly altered the course of human life. People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals

but the best surgeons retain a deep recognition of the limitations of both science and human skill.

science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.

In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals. And we in the medical world have proved alarmingly unprepared for it.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.

From World War II onward, the picture shifted radically. Sulfa, penicillin, and then numerous other antibiotics became available for treating infections. Drugs to control blood pressure and treat hormonal imbalances were discovered. Breakthroughs in everything from heart surgery to artificial respirators to kidney transplantation became commonplace. Doctors became heroes, and the hospital transformed from a symbol of sickness and despondency to a place of hope and cure.

In some way, it may be in the nature of surgery itself to want to come to grips with the uncertainties and dilemmas of practical medicine. Surgery has become as high tech as medicine gets, but the best surgeons retain a deep recognition of the limitations of both science and human skill. Yet still they must act decisively.

In the course of a normal lifetime, the muscles of the jaw lose about 40 percent of their mass and the bones of the mandible lose about 20 percent, becoming porous and weak.

In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating.

When lipofuscin accumulates in sweat glands, the sweat glands cannot function, which helps explain why we become so susceptible to heat stroke and heat exhaustion in old age.

theology, the doctrine of God, which is always attacked and ridiculed by philosophy, which claims to be wisdom itself. And medicine, which always questions the validity of philosophy, and doesn't consider theology a science but a superstition…

Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. That's table sugar. You are made of the same stuff as table sugar. Just a couple of tiny differences here and there and look what happened to the sugar: it can stand upright and send tweets.

At that moment it would have been easier for me to spontaneously grasp quantum string theory

Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. That's table sugar. You are made of the same stuff as table sugar.

Save the world? I don't think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing's going to fix it, maybe not even science.

when a couple of members of the Harvard faculty announced all the evidence, Jefferson said, "I would rather believe that two Yankee professors have lied than believe that stones fall from the sky.…" He was a great man. But here he is wrong.

Let us say in its favor that though it is nonsense, it is gorgeous nonsense, and it does not lead us down slow cold steps to worship a tyrant in his tomb; and that at least there have never been Unicorn Riots, Unicorn Wars, Unicorn Persecutions, Unicorn Plagues, Unicorn Famines. A scholar in his study studying unicorns will compass no one's death in the sacred names of Science and Technology. Perhaps we are where we are because we have no more unicorns. Onward.

Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public.

In times like these, when their fat little comforts are threatened, you may be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice.

It is only in the realm of pure science that truth is an absolute criterion. When we deal with applied science, with technology—we deal with people. And when we deal with people, considerations other than truth enter the question.

It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry.

It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced.