If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment.
Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.
Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it’s futile to continue playing (conceptualizing).
I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can’t really do much with those in a fantasy setting.
I’m convinced that Theoretical Physicist is just another way of saying BS Artist.
After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one’s head against the universe until something gives?
Recount science with wise. If you tell it to ignorant, it is like a stack of hay blown by storm.
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.
The future possibilities of space-travel, which are now left mainly to unfounded fantasy, could be more soberly treated without ceasing to be interesting and could show to even the most adventurous of the young that a world without war need not be a world without adventurous and hazardous glory. To this kind of contest there is no limit. Each victory is only a prelude to another, and no boundaries can be set to rational hope.
I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn’t have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn’t exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives.
The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.
It was my fault, said Rosie. I added a bit too much science.
We talk about creating an utopia, but we install an empire and we build our success on the back of the exploited.We talk about equality, but we ignore the power structures that silence the voices of the less powerful. We talk about meritocracy, but we only promote and care for those from the core planets. We talk about science and rationality, but we pray to extinct gods and worship mutated humans.
Forests capture the most carbon dioxide on land, and existing mature, primary forests are responsible for the great majority…Protecting existing forests would have far more impact between now and 2100 than newly planted forests.
All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.
It’s almost as if each instant is our last and first. We are always dying, and always reborn. And that is living.
The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.
Louis XIV of France said that only the small man desires always to be right. It struck Raven that the route to discovery and knowledge lay not in the desire to be right, but in one’s preparedness to be wrong. Perhaps seeking proof that tested one’s contention was as important as garnering proof to support it.
Some piously record ‘In the beginning God’, but I say ‘In the beginning hydrogen’.
Ponder this for a moment. Newborn ducklings, with the briefest of exposure to sensory stimuli, detect patterns in what they see, form abstract notions of similarity/dissimilarity, and then will recognize those abstractions in stimuli they see later and act upon them.
Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.
My parents were typical Asian parents, and they do, like all parents, want their children to be successful. They really encouraged my brother and I to study math and science, and that’s what we did as kids.
The air is charged, the beings making up the forest biome thrumming to a beat I can’t quite understand.
If our existence were limited to the science that attempts to explain it, our existence wouldn’t exist.
Bütün bunlar bize, algının, duyusal girdilerle içsel ön görüler arasında yapılan etkin kıyaslamayı yansıttığını söyler ve bu, bize daha da büyük bir kavramı anlama olanağı sunar: Çevrenizin farkına, ancak duyusal girdilerin beklentilerle çeliştiği zamanlarda farkına varırsınız. Dünya beklentilerinizle uyuştuğunda farkındalığa gereksinim yoktur, çünkü beyin işini gayet iyi biçimde görmektedir.
[Edward Teller} had “the most important kvestion of all”. Leaning closer, he said, “Vill you be villing to vork on veapons?”Unbidden, images from Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove leaped to mind. But Teller had impressed me as a deep, reflective man. I said I would—occasionally, at least. I had grown up deep in the shadow of the Cold War. My father was a career army officer, and I had spent six years living with my family in occupied post-war Japan and Germany. It seemed to me that the best, indeed the only, way to avoid strategic conventional war, whose aftermath I had seen in shattered Tokyo and Berlin. ….That afternoon began my long, winding involvement with modern science and fiction, the inevitable clash of the noble and imaginary elements in both science and fiction with the gritty and practical. I have never settled emotionally the tensions between these modes of thinking. Growing up amid the shattered ruins of Germany and Japan, with a father who had fought through World War II and then spent long years occupying the fallen enemy lands, impressed me with the instability of even advanced nations. The greatest could blunder the most.
A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it’s hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman — or more likely a robot — of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult.What a perverse fate for one of our kind’s greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you’re an adult you’ll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we’re talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe — mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together — beyond, around, and within us. It doesn’t just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** — as deep in us as any of our urges.
What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination.
Science is the ability to predict and manipulate the universe. The rest is Philosophy.
Around two or three times a year, we would notice the wind blowing harder than usual, which meant a giant wave was coming.
Creating human-level intelligence is not just allowed by the laws of nature, we even have an existence proof: people.
Elon Musk will be the cause of AI controlling humans and the necessities of life.
Home is wherever you can feel safe, loved, nurtured and wanted, yet not needed.
I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.
All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing – and he won’t be missed either.
It is indeed a feeble light that reaches us from the starry sky. But what would human thought have achieved if we could not see the stars?
From the radio and the world wide web, to the steam engine and penicillin, for generations the U.K. has been a world-leader in science and research.
As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.
Credentials are like potential energy, the compliments of a name on paper, in documents, word of mouth, but faith is like kinetic energy, the motion and the force that which is witnessed. Hence in the end it is the faith rather than the credentials that really takes you places.
Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.
…Once again confirms that there is no such thing as genetically pure classification into different races.
We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language.
College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line.
In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, ‘facts’. We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts.
The passing of the Absolute through itself, between two zeros or two nothings, is life. This passage, which makes life possible, is impossible without nothingness as an equally important “force.” Only nothingness is emptiness or an absolute vacuum. The Absolute Source creates the world and life by swallowing emptiness, not by the explosion into the void.
For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We’ve had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven’t seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.
Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child’s relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don’t know as much as we think we know.
I grew up a Red Sox fan. I grew up going to Fenway Park and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Science Museum and Symphony Hall and going to the Common, walking around. My whole family at different times lived and worked in Boston.
If amino acids can only be made where there is no free oxygen in the atmosphere, and porphyrins can only be made when there is free oxygen, then these things needed by every cell could not have existed together to form the first cell! What’s more, many of these compounds are antagonistic. They will combine and destroy each other—anywhere except within a living cell.
Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don’t want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn’t have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social ‘yak yaks.’
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. This is because after a last analysiswe are ourselves a part of the mystery we are trying to solve.
In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.
The more I learn about the truth of human civilization, the freer I become from this fantasy world
Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.
Artificial intelligence has filled the bridge between our dimensions
See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind … is the one fundamental treason which the scholar’s mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.
The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.
Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
Every leader-writer who thunders ‘Galileo’ at us assumes that we know even less about Galileo than he does.
Claiming sole credit for scientific discovery is like claiming sole credit for a movie. Just like you and everyone involved, I played my role.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.