Quotes About Discovery

we can't see even into the Oort cloud, so we don't actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.1 About

a Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovi?i? was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary between the crust and the layer immediately below, the mantle; this zone has been known ever since as the Mohorovi?i? discontinuity, or Moho for short.

to nonlocals

Trinil skullcap.

By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions years old, but probably not more than that. So

Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Western Australia, found that many stomach cancers and most stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori.

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.

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point18 upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, 'Oh fuck, not another phylum.' The

The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms.

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

The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins.

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.

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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.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.

In short, there is just a great deal we don't know.

To me that was just a miracle. That has been my position with science ever since. Excited

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

It seemed such an extraordinary notion—that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.