Quotes About Science

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

in the words of Carl Sagan.

the strange behavior of the electron. The principal problem they faced was that the electron sometimes behaved like a particle and sometimes like a wave.

When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade.

times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland.

On 1 July 1858, Darwin's and Wallace's theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the day of the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son.

Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains. For Cretaceous (from the Latin for chalk) we are indebted to a Belgian geologist with the perky name of J. J. d'Omalius d'Halloy.

Denham Harman had not, in 1945, read an article about aging in his wife's Ladies' Home Journal and developed a theory that free radicals and antioxidants are at the heart of human aging. Harman's idea was never anything more than a hunch, and subsequent research proved it to be wrong, but nonetheless the idea has taken hold and will not go away. The sale of antioxidant supplements alone is now worth well over $2 billion a year.

When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer's day, it's really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.

McDonald Observatory in Texas

among them Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent") and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent").

Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages.

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.

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, painted here by his friend Jan Vermeer, was a self-taught instrument maker.

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.

To explain what kept atoms together, other forces were needed, and in the 1930s two were discovered: the strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.

humans are in the domain eucarya, in the kingdom animalia, in the phylum chordata, in the subphylum vertebrata, in the class mammalia, in the order primates, in the family hominidae, in the genus Homo, in the species sapiens.

Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us—evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.

Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.

The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.

Typically a cell will contain some 20,000 different types of protein, and of these about 2,000 types will each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules.