The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.
Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.
I’ve always been a big fan of science fiction and of the worlds of the spiritual and the mystic.
In ‘Cosmicomics,’ I came close to science fiction – I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system.
Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.
Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.
Down there between our legs, it’s like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?
There are many paths to success. True success is happiness. It is lying on your deathbed, looking back at your life, and feeling a sense of satisfaction.
Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?
The best, most wonderful, indelible, and greatest achievements of humanity are accomplished not by a single individual, but a team of innovative thinking individuals.
Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ.
We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.
Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.
Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.
Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs–what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?
Oh! to shoot for the stars if feels right. Aim for my heart if it feels right.
Young scientists are rushed to specialize before they know how to think. They end up unable to produce good work themselves and unequipped to spot bad or fraudulent work by their colleagues.
They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.
The more I read arguments for atheism, the more I am convinced it takes a very strong faith to be an atheist. And atheism seems to me the least reasonable of all faiths.
It is wrong to use statements such as “there is no south of the South Pole” as proof that there is nothing beyond the point when time stops. Such statements may sound seductive, but they are not scientific, nor do they prove what they try to prove.
The methods and tools of science perennially breach barriers, granting me confidence that our epic march of insight into the operations of nature will continue without end.
In this modern day, when only what we see is allowed to have certainity, and when scientific data seems to hold the trump card for truth, when only what can be measured exists, love defies all these strictures and dances joyfully before the eyes of human beings, teasing them with the promise of the unknown.
It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state…
The problem lies in the hubris of the designing parents, in their drive to master the mystery of birth. Even if this disposition does not make parents tyrants to their children, it disfigures the relation between parent and child, and deprives the parent of the humility and enlarged human sympathies that an openness to the unbidden can cultivate.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
Give me a team of five, with an engineer, physicist, mathematician, coder and composer, and I’ll improvise a nation impenetrable, without needing to kill a single soldier.
I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.
I ended your experiment. Because you’re not a scientist. You’re a monster. I’m not leaving any of them at your mercy.
National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.
The Glassco Commission was really not interested in good science. It was interested in good accounting.
The purpose of science is not down-scaling everything to physical level and measure, but to penetrate deeper into the realm beyond the sensory perceptions and bring more in-depth knowledge and wisdom to the world.
I am aware of the usefulness of science to society and of the benefits society derives from it.
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
In World War II, a British mathematician named Alan Turing led the effort to crack the Nazis’ communication code. He mastered the complex German enciphering machine, helping to save the world, and his work laid the basis for modern computer science. Does it matter that Turing was gay?
The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.
I’m not against A.I. replacing jobs as long as there is human supervision that can ensure safety and accuracy. Evolution has priority and humans always learn to compromise with it.
I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.
You need virtual reality to understand high level science or high level math. It’s very helpful to explain third and fourth dimensional things that people are constantly addressing in quantum physics. But, as soon as you’re creating an avatar, and you can live and you can start to feel sensations on VR, that has gone too far.
Turning hard material (e.g., bones) into fossils is easy in a lab setting, but in 1993, scientists were even able to make fossils from soft animal tissues! New York Times’ Science Watch reports: Scientists have for the first time produced fossils of soft animal tissues in a laboratory. In the process they discovered that most of the phosphate required for the fossilization of small animal carcasses comes from within the animal itself.
In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind.
If to have breasts is to be human, then to save them is to save ourselves.
She joked that her rational mind would never allow her to interpret a sight like that as a sign like Louis was listening. Skepticism has a price
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 – 2005), who in his book ‘Relativity and Common Sense’ says:… The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls.
What is it with science these days? Everyone is so quick to believe in it, in all these new scientific discoveries, new pills for this, new pills for that. Get thinner, grow hair, yada, yada, yada, but when it requires a little faith in something you all go crazy.’ He shook his head, ‘If miracles had chemical equations then everyone would believe.
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we’d be so simple that we couldn’t.
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism–and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.
I went to Antarctica on a science research boat just to sort of clear my head.
Women of my generation who’ve stayed in science have done it by playing the men at their own game.
Even before vibrations are detected by its lyriform organs, the web determines which vibrations will arrive at the leg. The spider will eat whatever it’s aware of, and it sets the bounds of its awareness–the extent of its Umwelt–by spinning different kinds of webs. The web, then, is not just an extension of a spider’s senses but an extension of its cognition. In a very real way, the spider thinks with its web. Tuning the silk is like tuning its own mind.
As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn’t really overturn a science paradigm.
Siempre me han preocupado aquellos con grandes posibilidades de cambiar el mundo. Nunca puedo predecir cómo conseguirán ese cambio, sólo que es probable que lo hagan.
The birth of quantum physics brought science and spirituality into alignment. It was the realization by physicists that photons have consciousness, and not just limited consciousness, but awareness of the entire cosmos.
That’s the whole problem with science. You’ve got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.
[I]n any profession the highest order of work is achieved, not by fussy empirical demands for ‘something to be done,’ but by patient study of the eternal laws.