Quotes About Science

Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.

Leibniz's most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.

Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that was intended to automate the solution of some especially tedious differential equations.

A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist's mind before he or she begins to do science.

Neal Stephenson

For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. —HOBBES, Leviathan

Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals—

Neal Stephenson

Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo," Enoch said.

If you don't run with this crowd, you might assume that SF is an abbreviation of Science Fiction. But here it means Speculative Fiction. This coinage is a way to cope with the problem that Science Fiction is mysteriously, inextricably conjoined with the seemingly unrelated literature of Fantasy. Many who are fond of one are fond of the other, to the point where they perceive them as The Same Thing in spite of the fact that they seem quite different to non-fans.

Finally, in graphic novels and video games, SF is, of course, dominant.

Neal Stephenson

that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

Secondly, that Leibniz's most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.

I'll be honest with you: as a physicist, I am a hack," he admitted. "I majored in it, yes, but I was never employed in that capacity. But if you cut me I still bleed physicist blood. I'll go to my grave believing that, if magic existed, there's a scientific explanation for it.

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson

In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story.

Neal Stephenson

Arjuna asteroid.

The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere:

In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth-century alchemist or something.

Neal Stephenson