Quotes About Science

Ideas trickle out of science, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into less protectable eddies of art and philosophy.

JUPITER'S MOONS (1610)

LOGARITHMS (1614)

BLOOD CIRCULATION (1628)

SLIDE RULE (1632)

LAW OF FALLING BODIES (1634)

ANALYTIC GEOMETRY (1637)

MECHANICAL CALCULATOR (1645)

VACUUM PUMP (1654)

LIGHT SPECTRUM (1665)

MICROORGANISMS (1674--1680)

HOOKE'S LAW (1676)

LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION (1686)

THREE LAWS OF MOTION AND ORBITS OF COMETS (1687, 1705)

The first scientifically grounded forecast appeared in the Times (London) on August 1, 1861, predicting a temperature in London of 62°F, clear skies, and a southwesterly wind. The forecast proved to be accurate—the temperature peaked at 61°F that day—and before long, weather forecasts became a staple of most newspapers, even if they were rarely as accurate as FitzRoy's initial prediction.

Scientists call this shutdown7 "transient hypofrontality." Transient means temporary. "Hypo," the opposite of "hyper," means "less than normal." And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that generates our sense of self. During transient hypofrontality, because large swatches of the prefrontal cortex turn off, that inner critic comes offline. Woody goes quiet.

Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger's device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals.

We both approach the world as economists, and as economists resigned to - and sometimes even reveling in - the character defect that diverts us from pure science to policy analysis. An economist who has abandoned his resistance to policy analysis is liable to fall prey to even more seductive and dangerous vice of policy formulation.

la economía es una ciencia que cuenta con herramientas excelentes para la obtención de respuestas, pero que sufre una seria escasez de preguntas interesantes.

Remarkably, though sadly predictably, British psychiatrists still cling to the psycho-social model that has subverted meaningful research for the past 30 years, establishing the validity of Max Planck's observation that science progresses one retirement at a time.

The typical imperative from biology is not Thou shalt... , but If ... then ... else.

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.

Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.