Quotes About Curiosity

radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old. Curiously

Eventually he made it to Buckingham Palace, where the king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought along a pail for the purpose.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.

We live on a planet that more or less has an infinite capacity to surprise.

to nonlocals

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics.

J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.

Clearly there was a need for some inspired and clever experimentation, and happily the age produced a young person with the diligence and aptitude to undertake it.

Matters were not helped, as David Bodanis points out in his superb book E = mc2, when the New York Times decided to do a story, and—for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder—sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.

Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook)

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

it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

in the words of Carl Sagan.

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

Then, having nothing better to do, I leafed through the index and amused myself, in a very low-key way, by looking for ridiculous names, of which Australia has a respectable plenitude. I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, painted here by his friend Jan Vermeer, was a self-taught instrument maker.

Traveling is more fun—hell, life is more fun—if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you where babies came from. And these, you may recall, were men who thought science was nearly at an end. *

Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms. In one of his least successful experiments13 he tried to study the explosive properties of gunpowder by observing a small blast at close range; he nearly blinded himself in the process.

That was the golden age of moss collecting.

One planet, one experiment." If