Quotes About Discovery

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

We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At

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

That was the golden age of moss collecting.

At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female.

ocean vents harbour some of the most extraordinary life on the planet.

assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I

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 discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At

Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century... scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren't there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion. Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life.

Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct.

no less than 99.5 per cent of the world's habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in practical terms completely—off limits to us. It

Alpha Centauri

With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is 'less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground'2, in the words of Carl Sagan. In

The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what is in our own solar system. Now

Seldom – perhaps never – has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully by animosity.

One planet, one experiment." If

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it.

Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon.

certainly have some wonders yet to find.

They knew there was something there – possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies – and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, intently studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies and what's the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without, issuing small profound hmmmms and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.

Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn't bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest corporations in the world thanks in large part to its unrivaled lead in long-distance telephony.

Wow, look at all the places you can park," he said, as if for all these years he had been cruising endlessly, unable to terminate a journey.