Quotes About Science

assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I

Put another way, the amount of electricity going on within your cells is a thousand times greater than the electricity within your house. You are, in a very small way, exceedingly energetic.

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 discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At

Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century... scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren't there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion. Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life.

it was a pretty good insight into how unattractive science can get when you're playing at a certain level.

appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky's "dark matter"—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.

DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is "among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world

Alpha Centauri

The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work.

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently

Seldom – perhaps never – has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully by animosity.

when we peer into the distance some of the galaxies we see may simply be reflections, ghost images created by rebounded light.

dark matter," which is invisible to us and yet is believed to account for 90 per cent, or more, of all the matter in the universe. Dark matter was first theorized in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky

One planet, one experiment." If

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

dihydrogen oxide

They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do.

MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects—really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars).

I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose—Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery

WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which is to say specks of invisible matter left over from the Big

it became fixed in many people's minds that MSG was a kind of toxin. In fact, it isn't.

A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book. Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to "the entire digital content of today's world

And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.

The conviction that we should all drink eight glasses of water a day is the most enduring of dietary misunderstandings.