Quotes About Scientists

As scientists have discovered - or perhaps explained is a better word, or perhaps identified - we now live in the age of the Anthropocene. The geologic age of the Anthropocene. Those high priests of material evidence have given us our own epoch like the Holocene, the Pleistocene! Apparently we now, it seems, have superhuman powers.

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances. Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do.

Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.

To unambiguously settle the questions of whether there was life on Mars, it will take scientists down on the surface.

The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound or bottoms of barrels being scraped.

If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, scientists would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.

A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.

THE ARGUMENT FROM ADMIRED RELIGIOUS SCIENTISTS The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.

Scientists who use such language, whether at the level of the individual or the gene, know very well that it is only a figure of speech. Genes are just DNA molecules. You'd have to be barking mad to think that 'selfish' genes really have deliberate intentions to survive!

Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.

The people call it a miracle; the scientists call it invention. But the invention is miraculous, is it not?

Scientists have solved the problem of solipsism with a strategy called 'inference to the best explanation'. It's a cheap accommodation, and no one is happy about it, with the possible exception of those alien overlords.

American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money.

A man who is intentionally unarmed relies upon the Unseen Force called God by poets, but called the Unknown by scientists.

At NIH, what tends to happen is that the proven researchers tend to get the money. New researchers, younger researchers, or people on the cutting edge don't get the money until they have gray beards.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.

Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled.

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

Try to remember that artists in these catastrophic times, along with the serious scientists, are the only salvation for us, if there is to be any.

But there was one thing more about quantum physics that thoroughly annoyed most of the scientists who truly understood its implications. Because it dealt so intimately with the nature of matter—and reality—quantum physics also had quite a few things to say about things that, until recently, were strictly the preserve, not of physics, but of metaphysics . . . of religion, and—whisper it softly—of philosophy.11

si nos convertimos en científicos de la realidad interior, utilizaremos adecuadamente la ciencia para la felicidad de todos.

True brilliance has a well-known positive correlation with decency, much of the time--a fact the rest of us rely on, more than we ever know. The real world doesn't roil with as many crazed artists, psychotic generals, dyspeptic writers, maniacal statesmen, insatiable tycoons, or mad scientists as you see in dramas.