Quotes About Science

All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals.

before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since that time lead levels had climbed steadily and dangerously.

There is a lot of salt in the sea- enough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about five hundred feet. p280

Not one particle of the heavy stuff so vital to our own being—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the rest—emerged from the gaseous brew of creation. But—and here's the troubling point—to forge these heavy elements, you need the kind of heat and energy of a Big Bang. Yet there has been only one Big Bang and it didn't produce them. So where did they come from? Interestingly

A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist's mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong

like physics before it," Woese wrote, "has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation." In

Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook)

What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching.

Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.

In simplest terms, what the equation says is that mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen.

Water is everywhere. A potato is 80 percent water, a cow 74 percent, a bacterium 75 percent. A tomato, at 95 percent, is little but water. Even humans are 65 percent water, making us more liquid than solid by a margin of almost two to one.

Each one carries a copy of the complete genetic code—the instruction manual for your body—so it knows not only how to do its job but every other job in the body.

Proteins can't exist without DNA, and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume then that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow.

You have at least 200,000 different types of protein laboring away inside you, and so far we understand what no more than about 2 percent of them do.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting

To me that was just a miracle. That has been my position with science ever since. Excited

At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.

A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous

Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire.

According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between

Because it expands, ice floats on water—"an utterly bizarre property," according to John Gribbin.

For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere.

three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.

Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you.