Quotes About Discovery

The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa.

Realizing they had no clear notion of how far it was from New York to Paris by the great circle route, they went to a public library and measured the distance on a globe with a piece of string. By such means was one of history's greatest planes built.

Childe would almost certainly have been fascinated with Çatalhöyük because almost nothing about the place made sense.

Personally I can think of nothing more exciting—certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee—than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about.

Bacon's dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim 'there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied'.

I might not be the first person in history to touch both ends of the Bryson Line, but I was certainly the first to do it and know he had done it. So

Although Funk coined the term vitamines and is thus often given credit for their discovery, most of the real work of determining the chemical nature of vitamins was done by others, in particular Sir Frederick Hopkins, who was award the Nobel Prize for his work, a fact that left Funk permanently in one.

Some years ago, Pearce made a curious discovery—that people who had had a cat early in life seemed to derive lifelong protection from getting asthma.

noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much more promising to me.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.)

This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all.

The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.

Australia is just so full of surprises.

Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe

I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the container doors pop open and the contents float to the surface.

the basement. Katz

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish's finding.

Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff.

It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.

Just passing through a door, being inside, surrounded by walls and a ceiling, was novel.

there. I had thought we would have

It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for 'Oll Korrect'. At

Atwater's most unsettling discovery—to himself as much as to the world at large—was that alcohol was an especially rich source of calories, and thus an efficient fuel. As the son of a clergyman and a teetotaler himself, he was appalled to report it, but as a diligent scientist he felt his first duty was to the truth, however awkward. In consequence, he was swiftly disowned by his own, devoutly Methodist university and its already scornful president.