Quotes About Science

When something glows from being heated, it emits light in all parts of the spectrum, but will always peak somewhere.

You could, in principle, perform this stunt if you managed to let forth a powerful and sustained exhaust of flatulence.

How about methane? It too is chemically unstable, and yes, some of it is anthropogenic, but as we've seen, methane has nonliving agents as well.

Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance

With only one proton in its nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest and simplest element, made entirely during the big bang. Out of the ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system.

Uranus was almost named George.

I long for a civilization to develop a level of science literacy, so that we can become better shepherds of our future on this planet.

Astronomy, because of that peculiar history, has a fascinating legacy of early contributions by women.

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

My confidence that there is a loving God who cares at all for your health or your longevity, based on what I see in the physical universe, is so low that it's not something that I would spend any time investing in, to try to explore any further about whether or not it's true. I'll let other people do that exploring. Read in the New Yorker, sometime in March, 2015

This was not, of course, the first time that significant monies were spent on military programs. Kennedy knew, if only implicitly, that while bravery may win battles, science and technology provide security. Science and technology win wars.

Si la velocidad orbital de la Tierra fuera mayor que la raíz cuadrada del doble de su velocidad actual, nuestro planeta alcanzaría una «velocidad de escape» y, como cabe suponer, escaparía del sistema solar. Podemos

The word "lepton" derives from the Greek leptos, meaning "light" or "small.

During the quark–lepton era the universe was dense enough for the average separation between unattached quarks to rival the separation between attached quarks.

Had Earth been much closer to the Sun, the oceans would have evaporated. Had Earth been much farther away, the oceans would have frozen. In either case, life as we know it would not have evolved.

Brick walls are opaque to our eyes, but to microwaves those walls are transparent, which is why we can talk on our cell phones while indoors.

No, it's not Pluto. Get over it.

This general flattening of objects that rotate is why Earth's pole-to-pole diameter is smaller than its diameter at the equator. Not by much: three-tenths of one percent—about twenty-six miles.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!" One thing quarks do have going for them: all their names are simple—something chemists, biologists, and especially geologists seem incapable of achieving when naming their own stuff.

Since four coordinates are needed, we know that we live in a four-dimensional universe

I claim no special knowledge of when the end of science will come, or where the end might be found, or whether an end exists at all. What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves. This limit of our mental faculties, and not necessarily of science itself, ensures to me that we have only just begun to figure out the universe.

It is often true that groundbreaking discoveries are made from poor data at the leading edge

The stars of the Milky Way galaxy trace a big, flat circle. With a diameter-to-thickness ratio of one hundred to one, our galaxy is flatter than the flattest flapjacks ever made. In fact, its proportions are better represented by a crepé or a tortilla.

The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brain spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.