Quotes About Research

journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics.

THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY PICTURES ARE FLASHED BY WIRE AND RADIO SYNCHRONIZING WITH SPEAKER'S VOICE COMMERCIAL USE IN DOUBT BUT AT&T HEAD SEES A NEW STEP IN CONQUEST OF NATURE AFTER YEARS OF RESEARCH

Although scientists were in an internationally co-operative mood, nations weren't.)

Called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," it is one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published, as much for how it was presented as for what it said.

As time has shown, it wasn't nearly so simple. Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953—and

Oh, you can trust the studies well enough, generally speaking. What you can't trust are the sweeping conclusions that people often attach to them.

And it is all the more extraordinary when you reflect that despite perpetually modest funding Britain still has three of the world's top ten universities and eleven of the top one hundred. Put another way, Britain has 1 percent of the world's population, but 11 percent of its best universities, and accounts for nearly 12 percent of total academic citations and 16 percent of the most highly cited studies. I

E. C. Bullard of Cambridge University in 1949 that this fluid part of the Earth's core revolves in a way that makes it, in effect, an electrical motor, creating the Earth's magnetic field.

There is actually a certain value in not finding anything," he said. "It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving.

We have been gulled by the ease of air travel and other forms of communication into thinking that the world is not all that big, but at ground level, where researchers must work, it is actually enormous.

like physics before it," Woese wrote, "has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation." In

What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching.

Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.

You have at least 200,000 different types of protein laboring away inside you, and so far we understand what no more than about 2 percent of them do.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting

At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.

Denham Harman had not, in 1945, read an article about aging in his wife's Ladies' Home Journal and developed a theory that free radicals and antioxidants are at the heart of human aging. Harman's idea was never anything more than a hunch, and subsequent research proved it to be wrong, but nonetheless the idea has taken hold and will not go away. The sale of antioxidant supplements alone is now worth well over $2 billion a year.

Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us—evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.

Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature.

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos

Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If

Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution.

They determined, for instance, that a rusting object doesn't lose weight, as everyone had long assumed, but gains weight – an extraordinary discovery.