Quotes About Science

I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.

Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.

Carbon has this genius of making a chemically stable, two-dimensional, one-atom-thick membrane in a three-dimensional world. And that, I believe, is going to be very important in the future of chemistry and technology in general.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Human technology has made it to Mars. We are transmitting gorgeous pictures from it. Yet we have not explored our own planet. Two-thirds of it is covered with oceans that are still mysterious places.

I think the type of actor I am, I tend to play strong leading female characters. The shows I've been on happen to be science fiction genre.

When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type, most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings.

Through their work with fetal tissue, researchers hope to find ways to harness embryonic stem cells which have the ability to become any type of human cell and could provide new treatments for many illnesses.

Mr. Speaker, the scientific evidence is overwhelming that embryonic stem cells have great potential to regenerate specific types of human tissues, offering hope for millions of Americans suffering from debilitating diseases.

In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.

Consider: The human genome consists of about 3.3 billion base pairs. Since there are only four types of pair, that amounts to 0.8 gigabytes of information, or about what you can fit on a CD. With a microwave radio transmitter, you could beam that amount of information into space in a few minutes, and have it travel to anyone at light speed.

It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.

Only by studying large numbers of people can we figure out, are astronauts dying at a higher rate of cancer, and what types of cancers, than other people?

Personally I'm more into science and engineering types of things, not so much into testing 'Star Wars' myths.

It's the default premise in science: If you observe something in nature only once, you assume that what you've seen is typical. That's because 'typical' is just another way of saying 'most probable.'

Some of the best scientists can't explain gravity; Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, in the end, do they even know?

I'm a real nerd for science. I love Neil deGrasse Tyson and 'Cosmos' and all that.

There aren't that many female role models in science. There are a couple of women, but mostly you've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss - they're all guys. Bill Nye the Science Guy. I love that guy, but it's all guys.

What do we mean by soft matter? Americans prefer to call it 'complex fluids.' This is a rather ugly name, which tends to discourage the young students.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

My father was a professor of political science and also a young politician fighting for democracy in Kenya, and when things got ugly, he went into political exile in Mexico.

Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy... and on and on and on.

Perceptual reality is different for different species. In certain species it is a mode of observation, so what we call scientific fact is actually not ultimate truth, it is perceptual experience, and it's a mode of observation.

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.