Quotes About Science

'The Daily Show' took a topic - politics - which many people considered to be boring, confusing, or even annoying to learn about, and found a way to make it interesting, digestible, and fun. I believe 'Bill Nye Saves the World' can do the same for science.

Robots... I think that is a hot topic.

Usually, if you have a new idea, you very rarely break through to anything like recognizable development or implementation of that idea the first time around - it takes two or three goes for the research community to return to the topic.

It's hard for me to speculate about what motivates somebody like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk to talk so extensively about AI. I'd have to guess that talking about black holes gets boring after awhile - it's a slowly developing topic.

People often ask me why I persisted in doing research on a subject that was so controversial. I frequently respond by telling them that only a few scientists are granted the great fortune to pursue topics that are so new and different that only a small number of people can grasp the meaning of such discoveries initially.

I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years.

Science and mythology were the topics which fascinated me since my early childhood.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.

But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.

We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.

I think in the sciences there is still the general belief that America is still tops. For America to lose that, I think, would be very bad, not just speaking as a scientist myself. I think it would be very bad for the morale of the whole country.

Sometimes I think that our laboratories are but little earthworks which men build about themselves, and whose puny tops too often conceal from view the Olympian heights; that we who work in these laboratories are but skilled artisans compared with the man who is able to observe and to draw accurate deductions from the world about him.

Given the tendency of many to picture God's realm as somewhere high above Earth - an idea that sounds suspiciously like the Greek stories of deities perched on inaccessible mountain tops - it may seem plausible to assume that astronomers have special insight. Well, of course they don't.

It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium.

We have 26,000 genes. But a blind, millimetre-long roundworm with only 959 cells in total already has over 19,000.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total. That's been changing in the last few years.

The theory of evolution is totally inadequate to explain the origin and manifestation of the inorganic world.

STUDYING TIME MACHINES IN FLATLAND

Creationists just plain refuse to see it.

The best we can do is to predict the probability of seeing the electron in any particular location or with any particular velocity.

The new feature of quantum mechanics is the duplication of that pattern when the wave function branches. That's no reason to panic. We just have to adjust our notion of personal identity through time to account for a situation that we never had reason to contemplate over the millennia of pre-scientific human evolution.

There are tiny hints in the data that may indicate that this new particle is not just the minimal Higgs.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. His most recent award was a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. He is the author of From Eternity to Here and