Quotes About Science

When the shot is afterwards subjected to white light, colour appears because of selective reflection.

There is a history of thinking about space science from an environmental ethics perspective. And part of what I want to do is turn that back and use that experience to see if it reflects how we think about the Earth.

The Blair government perhaps ranks as the best the U.K. has had for 50 years. It cannot match the scale of Attlee's reforms, but has a fine record of constitutional reform and economic competence. In my own areas - science and innovation - there have been well-judged and effective changes.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.

Last year, I made a refrigerator in my basement. And I needed to because I needed to figure how - you know there is no such thing as 'cold.' There is only less heat.

I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.

With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, 'Oh, let's build a robot' and what's the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That's so 1950s. We are so past that.

I want to be better informed with regard to ichthyology.

I consistently encounter people in academic settings and scientists and journalists who feel that you can't say that anyone is wrong in any deep sense about morality, or with regard to what they value in life. I think this doubt about the application of science and reason to questions of value is really quite dangerous.

My father was an entomologist who believed in continental drift. In the early '50s, that was regarded as nonsense. It was in the mid-'50s that it came back. Someone had thought of it 30 or 40 years earlier named Alfred Wegener, and he never got to see it come back.

Regardless of what humans do to the climate, there will still be a rock orbiting the sun.

Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist, the only difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent.

Our research is so complex that the resources of a single region of the world are no longer enough - both intellectually and economically, it must be a global effort.

The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity.

The work of the Energy Subcommittee of the Science, Space and Technology Committee is critical to our region.

It appears that the human genome does indeed contain deserts, or large, gene-poor regions.

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

We will admit that, out of the mud or sand which is found on the seashore or the beds of our rivers, at low water, shellfish or testaceous animals come forth, but it does not from thence by any means follow that they are produced without any regular course of generation.

You can't regulate every lab in the world.

When we first isolated PD-1, we didn't know what the function of this molecule would be. But while we were working on it for almost 10 years, we realized this is a very important molecule to regulate the immune system.

I have no military application in my research. You know, we are all involved into rehabilitation medicine.

Going to rehearsals of school plays got me out of science. It became clear what inspired me and what dampened my spirit. The only other thing I could do at school was trampolining - it didn't seem to have much future in it.

Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma if you're right. And if you're really lucky, you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation.

I did two master's degrees - aeronautics and astronautics, and the second one was technology and policy. That taught me how to think about issues in science and technology as they relate to the general public.