Quotes About Science

It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary...but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.

Einstein wrote, "Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

ALSO BY STEVE OLSON MAPPING HUMAN HISTORY: GENES, RACE, AND OUR COMMON ORIGINS COUNT DOWN: SIX KIDS VIE FOR GLORY AT THE WORLD'S TOUGHEST MATH COMPETITION ANARCHY EVOLUTION: FAITH, SCIENCE, AND BAD RELIGION IN A WORLD WITHOUT GOD (coauthored with Greg Graffin) ERUPTION:

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

And thanks to all those science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience.

which approach is more scientific: Aristotle's, which is explicitly and necessarily evaluative, which offers advice and exhortation about how to care for the political order, or contemporary political science, which claims to be neutral and nonpartisan, but which smuggles its values and preferences in through the back door.

My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

I also discovered the only complete Brontosaurus skull.

When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld.

How does a cosmos without a bearded, bathrobed God in the sky pull off all the things that a bearded, bathrobed guy in the sky was supposed to have pulled off? If there was no God who said 'Let there be light,' where did we get all that light?

I remember spending evenings looking at the sky with my dad, who was interested. He was a civil engineer and was interested in science as a kid. And he always encouraged me.

When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.

Technology is incredibly powerful. And in many ways, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can actually accomplish with the right science and the right technology. But to get there, you have to actually invest in R&D. And often that means you have to be willing to spend an awful lot in that R&D phase before you see the benefits.

Every person who went into the space industry did so because they looked up at the sky and were fascinated by it - not because they wanted to make a military or commercial object.

All indications are that three and a half billion years ago, Mars looked like Earth. It had lakes. It had rivers. It had river deltas. It had snow-capped peaks and puffy clouds and blue sky. Three and a half billion years ago, it was a happening place. The same time on Earth, that's when life started. So did life start on Mars?

All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn't have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions.

If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.

That's why I want to screw with the abyss of technology, play God with science, so I can hop, skip and slide back and forth through time.

There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners.

Child psychology and animal psychology are of relatively slight importance, as compared with the sciences which deal with the corresponding physiological problems of ontogeny and phylogeny.

Shortly after the 2004 Indonesian earthquake, I read that the earthquake had affected the rotation of the earth, shortening the length of our 24-hour day. Even though the change was extremely slight - only a few microseconds - I found the idea incredibly haunting.

I don't think immortality is necessarily the key to understanding the world. You have to be careful with what you think you're achieving. I'm all for science discovering amazing and fantastic things about our world, but I think the motivations behind it are slightly askew.

Science is difficult and slow no matter who you are. The hours are long, and the glorious 'aha' days come only very infrequently. You have to keep believing that if you put in the hours, those days will indeed come!