Quotes About Science

He fell prey to a common fallacy. He wanted to philosophize, that is, to play God; for what is philosophy, in the end, but the desire to understand things to a degree greater than science permits?

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy.

Turning captives into commodities was a thoroughly scientific enterprise. It turned on perfecting the practices required to commodify people and determining where those practices reached their outer limits (that is, the point at which they extinguished the lives they were meant to sustain in commodified form). Traders reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.

Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago.… But science is excepted from criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgment of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago.… science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. (ibid., p. 182)

An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc.

Those redshift numbers. The cephalopods must be leaving at close to light speed." "Where do you think they are going?" "Maybe that isn't the point, Maura. Maybe the point is what they are trying to flee.

We are a side-effect of the universe, not its central function – which seems to be to create star stuff, to form stars.

She had always had a streak of recklessness about her, a willingness to go chasing hurricanes and tsunamis, all in the name of science, always willing to go that bit further than anybody else. Disaster hunting, she called it, surfing the extreme weather.

Stephen Baxter

Blake's Seven.

Stephen Baxter

Laschamps Excursion

Stephen Baxter

Earth was the first planet to be terraformed.

But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions, which is just as well, or it wouldn't be much of a career path, would it?

Stephen Baxter

It takes seven years to digest gum.

NASA scientists have discovered a new form of life, unfortunately, it won't date them either.

Scientists have invented a new strain of cannabis without the high. They celebrated with non-alcoholic beer and furious dry-humping.

NC passed law against global warming science, therefore it's not happening. So I'm ignoring Twitter's 140-character limit, so it's not happ

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." Sorry, Darwin-huggers, but it's not "In the beginning, a monkey evolutioned gay marriage.

Science attacks our most cherished opinions. Opinions which come straight from our collective gut. Oh, wait, according to gastroenterologists, the only thing that comes from the gut is waste left from the digestion of food. That's right, "waste." I guess that means that scientists literally think our opinions should be flushed down the toilet!

Physics. Some say this science is fundamental; I say it's a bunch of unnecessary regulations. Physics is the ultimate Big Government interference—universal laws meant to constrain us at every turn.

Earth science being what it was, however, the tests eventually included feeding a bit of the substance to a rat.