Quotes About Science

EÄŸer bilim tarihi bize tek bir ÅŸey gösteriyorsa, o da cehaletimize 'Tanr?' etiketini yap??t?rarak bir yere ulaÅŸamad???m?zd?r.

Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens

When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn't happen with holy books.

Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows—but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe . . . no, that's holy? . . . We

Sex really is binary. No question about it. You're either male or female, and it's absolutely clear. You can do it on gamete size, you can do it on chromosomes. To me as a biologist, it's distinctly weird that people can simply declare I am a woman, though I have a penis.

45 per cent of the population of the United States firmly believes, to the contrary, an elementary falsehood: that all species separately owe their existence to 'intelligent design' less than ten thousand years ago.

There is real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not 'meant' to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, 'But we're working on it.

There's a kind of science defense lobby or evolution defense lobby in particular . They are mostly atheist, but they are desperately wanting to be friendly to mainstream, sensible, religious people. And the way you do that is to tell them that there's no incompatibility between science and religion. [Expelled, No Intelligence allowed, 2008, 47m38]

Radiation all along the larger spectrum can be unwoven in the same kind of way as the rainbow, although the particular instrument we use for the unweaving—a radio tuner instead of a prism, for instance—is different in different parts of the spectrum.

Irrationality is woven into the fabric of modern life we unthinkingly indulge unscientific delusion (Enemies of Reason).

I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish (201).

I need to discuss science vs. engineering. Put glibly: In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.

Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance.

Morality is as much an art as a science, and it calls for a certain versatility from us, the ability to improvise and respond to actual circumstances and particular situations.

Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. 'Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.'24

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations.

Among the dozens of hostile articles that have thus far appeared, none has successfully refuted any of its science.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in an opinion upholding the constitutionality of such a law.

The authors] have been cast as racists and elitists and The Bell Curve has been dismissed as pseudoscience . . . . The book's message cannot be dismissed so easily.

When I wasn't at school, I was experimenting at home, and became a bit of a Mad Scientist. I did hours of research on mayonnaise, for instance, and though no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating....By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history.

gluten has been implicated in mental illness since at least 1979

He died a modern death, in hospital,........after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive.

He did not want to make himself into a dramatic character. But sometimes, as his mind skittered in the small hours, he thought: so this is what history has come to. All that striving and idealism and hope and progress and science and art and conscience, and it all ends like this, with a man standing by a lift, at his feet a small case containing cigarettes, underwear and tooth powder; standing there and waiting to be taken away.