Quotes About Science

It has turned out, in fact, to be far harder to translate teleological into non-teleological language than had been anticipated by philosophers; or at any rate, by philosophers friendly towards Darwinism (as virtually all the writers in question are). Whether such translation is possible at all is more than anyone knows. As

Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.

Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

it takes photons of light just over 8 minutes to reach Earth, 150 million kilometers away.

No scientific theory can claim absolutely certainty.

Magic and new technology have always walked hand in hand - even back in the days of Robert Houdin.

Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.

objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our 'wall'.

history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.

We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden,* and hence fallible, as all our theories are. Consider

Amending the 'data', or rejecting some as erroneous, is a frequent concomitant of scientific discovery, and the crucial 'data' cannot even be obtained until theory tells us what to look for and how and why.

If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

Whenever we observe anything – a scientific instrument or a galaxy or a human being – what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes. In

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

No somos únicamente «escoria química» pues que, por ejemplo, el comportamiento general de nuestro planeta, nuestra estrella y nuestra galaxia depende de una magnitud física emergente, pero fundamental: el conocimiento que hay en dicha escoria.

If it turns out that all this time we have merely been studying the programming of a cosmic planetarium, then that would merely mean that we have been studying a smaller portion of reality than we thought. So what? Such things have happened many times in the history of science, as our horizons have expanded beyond the Earth to include the solar system, our Galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on, and, of course, parallel universes.

They can be understood only by being explained. Fortunately, our best theories embody deep explanations as well as accurate predictions.

We understand the fabric of reality only by understanding theories that explain it. And since they explain more than we are immediately aware of, we can understand more than we are immediately aware that we understand.

Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.

on learning how to reject their authority. This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto 'Nullius in verba', which means something like 'Take no one's word for it.

Richard Feynman said, 'Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.