Quotes About Science

If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.

Science asymptotically approaches reality.

Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them.

Like everyone else, scientists have intuitions. Indeed, hunches and flashes of insight—the sense that something is true even if you can't prove it—have been behind countless breakthroughs. The interplay between System 1 and System 2 can be subtle and creative.

Galen's writings were the indisputable source of medical authority for more than a thousand years. "It is I, and I alone, who has revealed the true path of medicine," Galen wrote with his usual modesty. And yet Galen never conducted anything resembling a modern experiment. Why

Not until the twentieth century did the idea of randomized trial experiments, careful measurement, and statistical power take hold. "Is the application of the numerical method to the subject-matter of medicine a trivial and time-wasting ingenuity as some hold, or is it an important stage in the development of our art, as others proclaim it," the Lancet asked in 1921. The

The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.11

The idea of randomized controlled trials was painfully slow to catch on and it was only after World War II that the first serious trials were attempted. They

Physicians and the institutions they controlled didn't want to let go of the idea that their judgment alone revealed the truth, so they kept doing what they did because they had always done it that way—and they were backed up by respected authority. They didn't need scientific validation. They just knew. Cochrane despised this attitude. He called it "the God complex.

What people didn't grasp is that the only alternative to a controlled experiment that delivers real insight is an uncontrolled experiment that produces merely the illusion of insight. Cochrane

In fact, in science, the best evidence that a hypothesis is true is often an experiment designed to prove the hypothesis is false, but which fails to do so.

If Galileo traveled in time to the present day to hear that we are having difficulty giving a physical explanation of consciousness, he would most likely respond, "Of course you are, I designed physical science to deal with quantities not qualities!

Who knoweth God the sum of science owns. The heavens record His handiwork; the earth Worships His footsteps; life His breath repeats; The soul His image; everlasting space, The harmonies of His nature echoing, round Reflects His vast extension; the great whole, His boundless being, and His infinite mind.

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Coffee is among the most studied food in science. One of its well-known abilities is to promote fat-burning. As the beverage highest in caffeine, it has been shown to reduce stored body fat, especially belly fat, and lower the risk of diabetes, liver and colon cancer, cardiovascular disease, and chronic inflammation.

philosophers will forever wrangle about the true nature of science as a prelude to their dream of the final knockdown argument which will silence all doubt and opposition to their own favorite utopia.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.

I am in short, a witch of the quantumverse.

The revolutionary despises any kind of doctrinarism and has rejected peaceful science, leaving it to future generations. He knows only one science—the science of destruction. For this and only for this he now studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, perhaps medicine. For this he studies day and night the living science of people, of the personalities and positions, and all the conditions of the present social structure in every possible stratum.

Aristotle made much of observation and strict classification of data in his studies. For this reason he is often considered as the father of empirical science and scientific method.

scientist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The point is now indisputable: when you have a well-validated statistical algorithm, use it.