Quotes About Science

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

You discard about a hundred billion red blood cells every day. They are a big component of what makes your stools brown.

Called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," it is one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published, as much for how it was presented as for what it said.

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

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

Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called "strange quarks," which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn't happened. Finding

Well, one school of thought says it was actually cool then because the sun was much weaker.' (I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as 'the Chinese restaurant problem' – because we had a dim sun.)

The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms.

The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for "little mass").

As time has shown, it wasn't nearly so simple. Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953—and

For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as science.

The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins.

The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.

if you make monomers wet they don't turn into polymers—except when creating life on the Earth.

The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.

significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects. Having such a fund of richness means that it can sometimes be taken for granted to a shocking degree, but

J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.

E. C. Bullard of Cambridge University in 1949 that this fluid part of the Earth's core revolves in a way that makes it, in effect, an electrical motor, creating the Earth's magnetic field.

Matters were not helped, as David Bodanis points out in his superb book E = mc2, when the New York Times decided to do a story, and—for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder—sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.

Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome—"not a 'force' but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime," in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

This is gravity—a product of the bending of spacetime.

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 × 1018 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which would have ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)