An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.
Nature inspires science, science fuels technology, and technology empowers life
Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.
But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.
Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable–the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.
When scientists let a genie out of the bottle, the spirit may be out of control. They honestly have no idea what will actually happen next after they lift the lid.
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those have not viewed the world.
It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!
I like to look for patterns in science and life. It’s what I do.
Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.
And what could be more silent and less interesting than a whelk?And yet…
Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.
Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.
Log Entry: SOL 118My conversation with NASA about the Water Reclaimer was boring and riddled with technical details. So I’ll paraphrase for you:Me: This is obviously a clog. How about I take it apart and check the internal tubing?NASA: (After about 5 hours of deliberation) No. You’ll fuck it up and die.So I took it apart.
A word had to predate the number. As a graphic sign, the number is the graphic expression of the word that predates it. Both words and numbers are linguistic expressions of thought. The purpose of words is to express and explain the essence, and the purpose of numbers is to express quantity. Words are qualificators, and numbers are quantifications.
It would seem that the scientific revolution involved not just a progressive transformation of scientific theory, but also a transformation in what were considered to be the observable facts!
When I got engaged to be married, it was assumed that I would quit science and be a housewife. It was considered shameful if a married woman had to work – it implied that her husband couldn’t earn enough to keep her.
All truths are easy to understand once they have been revealed. What is difficult is to discover them.
Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it’s equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.
Don’t they know science doesn’t work like that? You can’t just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you’ve been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you’re looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don’t they know you can’t get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? … No other human institution comes close.
If I may take the liberty to speak for science at least, today his name and his prizes are without a peer in the world. He not only elevates science but he influences it as well.
But, if you read science journals or the inside of Snapple caps, you might already know that watching TV is the closest you can get to being dead, which is why it’s so relaxing.
The worst response a researcher can get: not I don’t agree, but I don’t care.
It’s this accursed science…. It’s the very Devil. The medieval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it–and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons–now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!
And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
If we want to set out on the aruous search for the truth, we must all summon up the courage to leave the lines along which we have thought until now and as the first step begin to doubt everything that we previously accepted as correct and true. Can we still afford to close our eyes and stop up our ears because new ideas are supposed to be heretical and absurd?
Gwynned lies two days westwards; still further south, the weregeld calls. Mayhap with All-Father Woden’s favour, my deeds may yet inspire the skalds.
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
If you want to become humbler in your life, than travel in roadways, auto’s & pathways/streets in India.
The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.
We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.
My unexpected finding is that inside every man there lurk ancient caretaking tendencies that render a man every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother.
Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar inspected, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked, and even laser blasted.
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities… If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
That’s what Hubble can do for us. It can tell us whether the universe is expanding forever or if one day it’s going to come back together.
Project 523 was both a good and a bad thing. They held so many meetings, and there were so many competing centres, it was a real mess. Nearly every province had their own research centre, and they all asked me to share my research, which I did. But that’s no way to do science. They wasted a lot of money and a lot of time.
Economics is not an exact science. It’s a combination of an art and elements of science. And that’s almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we’re improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.
When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on ‘What would happen to the world if there was no friction?’ Answer: ‘Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.’ That was my mood.
Also unfortunately, Congress is far too busy asking if baseball players are really as strong as they seem and trying to choke bankers with wads of cash to grant more funds to such trifling matters as the avoidance of space bullets, so they won’t give NASA the money
Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
I am troubled by grave doubts about the usefulness of scientific endeavor and have a whole drawer filled with treatises on politics and their relation to science, written for myself with the sole purpose of clarifying my mind, and finding an answer to the question: will science lead to the elevation or destruction of man , and has my scientific endeavor any sense?
Love is a biological necessity that is as vital to a person’s wellbeing as fresh water, food, and exercise.
Looking towards joy is the most important of rewiring the stress response
An eternal universe is incompatible with the continuing existence of irreversible physical processes.
In experimental science, to say that one understands a process, or can explain it, means that one can control it.
Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.
Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.
‘Jurassic Park’ has a lot of science in it – and a lot of it is wrong – but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary.
Making movies is not rocket science. It’s about relationships and communication and strangers coming together to see if they can get along harmoniously, productively, and creatively. That’s a challenge. When it works, it’s fantastic and will lift you up. When it doesn’t work, it’s almost just as fascinating.
The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.
That’s the nature of revelation: it makes its own pronouncement. It says: the world you see before you is brand-new. The world you’ve known is gone.
Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.
If anything in the universe is sacred or valuable, it’s life itself. We should love our lives deeply. The universe has no other way to understand itself apart from life, and it does so in many different forms. Life gives meaning to the universe; there’s no need for any additional purpose to life. Simply being alive is a complete and fulfilling experience in itself.