Quotes About Science

Yet every now and then, even a scientist can't help thinking of the Periodic Table as a zoo of one-of-a-kind animals conceived by Dr. Seuss.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices. JAMES FERGUSON, 1757†

Between 1 and 10 quadrillion ants live on (and in) Earth

As a scientist, you must embrace the inconstancy of knowledge.

In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun's mass.

Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled. After all that, you'd think only one definition for truth should exist in this world, but no.

Merlin prefers to think of space as the regions between all the particles of all the atoms of the universe.

Indeed, upon learning of a 1931 book entitled One Hundred Authors Against Einstein,†† he responded that if he were wrong, then only one would have been enough.

The actual recipe for the asteroid belt? Take a mere 2.5 percent of the Moon's mass (itself, just 1/81 the mass of Earth), crush it into thousands of assorted pieces, but make sure that three-quarters of the mass is contained in just four asteroids. Then spread them all across a 100-million-mile-wide belt that tracks along a 1.5-billion-mile path around the Sun.

On canvas with paint In the Artist's school It's red that is hot And blue that is cool. But in science we show As the heat gets higher That a star will glow red Like the coals of a fire. Raise the heat some more And what is in sight? It's no longer red It has turned bright white. Yet the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, Is neither white nor red When the star has turned blue.

Earth's oceans will boil away about a billion years

The Speed of Light: It's Not Just a Good Idea It's the Law. Unlike

And without violating momentum laws, you cannot spontaneously levitate and hover above the ground, whether or not you are seated in the lotus position.† Knowledge

One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

Filling out the entire electromagnetic spectrum, in order of low-energy and low-frequency to high-energy and high-frequency, we have: radio waves, micro waves, ROYGBIV, ultra violet, x rays, and gamma rays.

apparently, for residents of Missouri. But it doesn't make for good science. Science is not just about seeing, it's about measuring, preferably with something that's not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias.

So dark matter is our frenemy. We have no clue what it is. It's kind of annoying. But we desperately need it in our calculations to arrive at an accurate description of the universe. Scientists are generally uncomfortable whenever we must base our calculations on concepts we don't understand, but we'll do it if we have to. And dark matter is not our first rodeo.

the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago.

Our star, and most stars, are made mostly of hydrogen, which is the number one element in the universe: 90% of all atomic nuclei are hydrogen, about 8% are helium, and the remaining 2% comprise all the other elements in the periodic table. All

Cosmologists have plenty of ego. How could you not when your job is to deduce what brought the universe into existence?

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don't know. Maybe there's nothing the matter with the matter, and it's the gravity we don't understand.

If you had a super-duper, jumbo-gigantic finger, and you dragged it across Earth's surface (oceans and all), Earth would feel as smooth as a cue ball.

Further analysis of the Sun's spectrum revealed the signature of an element that had no known counterpart on Earth. Being of the Sun, the new substance was given a name derived from the Greek word helios ("the Sun"), and was only later discovered in the lab. Thus, helium became the first and only element in the chemist's Periodic Table to be discovered someplace other than Earth.

As we've known from the beginning, dark matter does, indeed, exert gravity, to which ordinary matter responds. But that's it. After all these years, we haven't discovered it doing anything else.