Quotes About Scientists

The rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence—yet the rarer the event, the more confident these "scientists" involved in predicting, modeling, and using PowerPoint in conferences with equations in multicolor background have become.

By year's end Diebner had dozens of scientists under his watch across Germany refining the uranium-machine theory and building the first small experimental designs.

German scientists had perfected the shaped charges that could bring about these collisions at very high temperatures. Diebner and his team began putting together a series of experiments that would squeeze deuterium atoms together through the use of explosive shock waves inside a hollow silver ball, their goal being to trigger a fusion reaction—and create a bomb.

In Farm Hall, a quiet country house outside Cambridge, ten Uranium Club scientists were waiting for a decision to be made about their fate. They had been held there since July 3, 1945, rounded up when the Nazi regime fell, along with their papers, laboratory equipment, and supplies of uranium and heavy water. Among them were Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, and Kurt Diebner.

In the western United States, the geographer Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the "modest" Indian population "modified only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their everyday living needs." Vale is in the minority now. Spurred in part by historians like Cronon, most scientists have changed their minds about Indian fire.

When scientists list mammals in order of their genetic diversity, humans are at the bottom, along with endangered species like wolverines and lynxes.

Despite all the knowledge gained by scientists in the last few decades, this emotional realm remains much harder to reach. An obvious example on the southern coast is the Nazca, famous for the huge patterns they set into the ground. Figures of animals and plants, almost a thousand geometric symbols, arrow-straight lines many miles long—what were they for?

what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas.

Livermore scientists still insist that they have good reason to trust the computer's more recent predictions. They claim to have experiments that back up the computer code, but it is impossible to tell, from the outside, whether they are telling the truth.

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for we would know the mind of God.

Guys like the Monarch are not unique, and there are guys like him all over the world torturing dumb scientists.

He was a crystal of morality among our scientists.

But biology does not readjust to accommodate the false theories of scientists …' – James le Fanu, British physician

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

At our meeting, I suggested to Steven and Lynda two guidelines for the science of Interstellar: 1. Nothing in the film will violate firmly established laws of physics, or our firmly established knowledge of the universe. 2. Speculations (often wild) about ill-understood physical laws and the universe will spring from real science, from ideas that at least some "respectable" scientists regard as possible.

Through history, people look for something spiritual. The greatest scientists in the world were men of religion and faith, too.

We'd be better prepared for these emergencies if they didn't always come as such surprises. The next plague may start when yet another virus in some wild animal jumps into our species—a virus we might not yet even know about. To reduce that ignorance, scientists are surveying animals, searching for bits of genetic material from viruses. But because we live on a planet of viruses, that task is enormous.

Albert [Einstein] was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia: for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams. It is thus that serious scientists are made.

scientists are learning that people have more capacity for lifelong learning and brain development than they ever thought.

The Paleozoic was followed by the Permian extinction, when 95 percent of all life on Earth—plants and animals on both land and sea—died. Just like that. Just when they were beginning to get the hang of it. (To be fair, the period of extinction lasted millions of years, so "just like that" is an exaggeration, but scientists still don't know for sure why it happened.)

Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do…

THE trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together, and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it.

Demand may be a suitable subject for psychologists, supply may be the province of engineers or management scientists; both are beyond the scope of economics.

The lack of repetition has not stopped scientists from speculating on the causes of the two most fundamental phenomena crucial to our existence: the big-bang creation of the universe and the origin of life from nonliving matter. Were these miracles? After all, they were both onetime events.