Quotes About Science

Our seams don't burst, we don't spontaneously sprout leaks," says Nina Jablonski, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, who is the doyenne of all things cutaneous.

It is mildly disconcerting to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.

Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.

The British molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin, who played a central part in discovering the structure of DNA but suffered from the heavy chauvinism of her male colleagues.

a James Croll of Anderson's University in Glasgow. One of the papers, on how variations in Earth's orbit might have precipitated ice ages, was published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1864 and was recognized at once as a work of the highest standard. So there was some surprise, and perhaps just a touch of embarrassment, when it turned out that Croll was not an academic at the university, but a janitor.

Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule – that was part of us nine years ago.

We are very lucky, it appears, to get any good weather at all. Even less well understood are the cycles of comparative balminess within ice ages, known as interglacials. It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.

For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there

we can't see even into the Oort cloud, so we don't actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.1 About

journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics.

Trinil skullcap.

The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth's surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.

The most remarkable part of all is your DNA. You have a metre of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single fine strand it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.8 Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.

an atom with an abnormal number of neutrons.)

published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. Today

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone

Although scientists were in an internationally co-operative mood, nations weren't.)

By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions years old, but probably not more than that. So

Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity.

one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!

In fact, of course, the world was about to enter a century of science where many people wouldn't understand anything and none would understand everything.

In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm.

Altogether, according to John McPhee, [geological ages] number in the "tens of dozens." Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any of them again.