Quotes About Science

'2001' is a really interesting movie because it came out in 1968, and everybody thought that that was possible, and look how ridiculous that was. We don't have ships like that, and you know, nobody in 1968 was going, 'Oh, that'll never happen!' But of course it never happened. We're not even close to it.

Divinity is an emotion of being lifted out of yourself and being part of something much bigger than yourself that makes you go, 'Oh my God.' And that sense of awe? It's the second rule of science.

Finding oil is a multidisciplinary science. You need a lot of people - statisticians, engineers, and geologists, of course. And what I have learned in the past 30 years is that I read people better than I read books.

The box jellyfish takes you into an area of what I'd call science fiction. You feel like you've been dipped in hot burning oil. You burst into flames.

I have a biology degree, okay?

I like the 'Science Channel,' the 'Discovery Channel,' I like 'Discovery Times,' which is a fabulous hybrid of the 'New York Times' and 'Discovery Channel.' Maybe I'm just an old man, but I like to watch that stuff.

My older brother was the person who got me interested in science in general. He used to tell me what he learned in school. My first memory of mathematics is probably the time that he told me about the problem of adding numbers from 1 to 100.

A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year, we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge.

Research in basic sciences now requires resources that no one country can provide.

I've always loved far future SF, so it was more or less a given that I would one day want to write in that form.

One of the things that always appealed to me about Nasa was we were always doing cool stuff that no-one's done before.

The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just 'Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?' But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions.

One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.

But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.

One of the things I do know is we know very little about our universe. Even though we think we know a lot, and we do know a lot more than we used to, we have a lot to learn about our universe.

It's one of the things I want people to understand about science... You don't have to be the best person in the world at it. But you can be good, and there are so many different opportunities in science.

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas.

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.

I've always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it.

I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.

Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.

I'm chairing a UNESCO committee on how to improve global Internet communications for science; help third-world people get onto the Net so they can be part of the process.

In all my science fiction movies, I try to blend the familiar with the futuristic so as not to be too off-putting to the audience. There is always something familiar they can grab onto.