Quotes About Science

clearly no thinking presence behind any of the actions of the cells. It all just happens, smoothly and repeatedly and so reliably

Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble's breakthroughs possible.

The more or less universal belief that we should all walk ten thousand steps a day—that's about five miles—is not a bad idea, but it has no special basis in science. Clearly, any ambulation is likely to be beneficial, but the notion that there is a universal magic number of steps that will give us health and longevity is a myth. The ten-thousand-step idea is often attributed to a single study done in Japan in the 1960s, though it appears that also may be a myth.

there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos

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 where babies came from. And these, you may recall, were men who thought science was nearly at an end. *

Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If

Resulta un tanto fascinante pensar que si tu mismo te fueses deshaciendo con unas pinzas, átomo a átomo, lo que producirías sería un montón de fino polvo atómico, nada del cual habría estado nunca vivo pero todo él habría sido en otro tiempo tú.

Wallace's theory was, by Wallace's own admission, the result of a flash of insight; Darwin's was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. It was all crushingly unfair.

I think both sides have done a bit of a disservice to science by insisting that it must be one thing or the other. Things are likely to turn out to be not so straightforward as either camp would have you believe.

It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of palaeontology than Mary Anning

3.18-million-year-old australopithecine found at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974 by a team led by Donald Johanson. Formally known as A.L.

To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.

Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution.

Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms. In one of his least successful experiments13 he tried to study the explosive properties of gunpowder by observing a small blast at close range; he nearly blinded himself in the process.

We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At

They determined, for instance, that a rusting object doesn't lose weight, as everyone had long assumed, but gains weight – an extraordinary discovery.

That was the golden age of moss collecting.

The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres, which isn't so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the centre and dropped a brick down it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom

At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female.

ocean vents harbour some of the most extraordinary life on the planet.