Quotes About Science

Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.

However, one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.

Although quantum mechanics has been around for nearly 70 years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated, even by those that use it to do calculations.

the most important point: that the universe is governed by a set of rational laws that we can discover and understand.

do we really have reason to believe that an objective reality exists?

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence.

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it.

the entropy of an isolated system always increases, and that when two systems are joined together, the entropy of the combined system is greater than the sum of the entropies of the individual systems.

general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century.

Another prediction of general relativity is that time should appear to run slower near a massive body like the earth.

Black holes might be useful for getting rid of garbage or even some of one's friends.

A scientific law is not a scientific law, if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world. The

You can't get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.

the future is unknown and open, so it might well have the curvature required. This would mean that any time travel would be confined to the future. There would be no chance of Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise turning up at the present time.

in 1992 came the first confirmed observation of a planet orbiting a star other than our sun.

Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.

If so, we might be able to use them for rapid travel around the galaxy or travel back in time. Of course, we have not seen anyone from the future (or have we?) but I discuss a possible explanation for this.

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it.

In Newton's time it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then, the pace of the development of science has made this impossible. Because theories are always being changed to account for new observations, they are never properly digested or simplified so that ordinary people can understand them... Further, the rate of progress is so rapid that what one learns at school or university is always a bit out of date.

theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.