I’m confident in the world’s growth, so I’m confident about what lives under an atom. When I say this I mean, what lives beyond what we have knowledge of, and what new possibilities that the future holds.
Astrology is interesting but not very accurate. It’s a science I don’t trust very much.
My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.
Looking behind, I am lifted with gratitude. Looking forward, I am filled with vision. Looking upward, I am filled with strength. Looking within, I discover peace.
Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.
He’s a scientist. He’s never cried. He flips through Googled image searches of burn victims while he touches himself.
If we could stop thinking of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and processes very much in reach rather than the shadows of childlike, superstitious mythology.
There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.
La ventaja competitiva de una sociedad no vendrá de lo bien que se enseñe en sus escuelas la multiplicación y las tablas periódicas, sino de lo bien que se sepa estimular la imaginación y la creatividad.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it’s always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
John Muir, Earth — planet, Universe[Muir’s home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal]
Science is a way of sight, and nobody walks it better than the undoctrinated.
After long reflection in solitude and meditation, I suddenly had the idea, during the year 1923, that the discovery made by Einstein in 1905 should be generalised by extending it to all material particles and notably to electrons.
A regular old drag queen is usually your science teacher who’s actually wearing women’s panties underneath his slacks. A drag-queen superstar is someone who actually works in clubs and makes a living doing it more than one night a year, or even one night in six months.
Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
There’s no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there’s no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.
The experiments I’ve discussed so far have helped us understand what is going on in the brains of patients with phantoms and given us hints as to how we might help alleviate their pain. But there is a deeper message here: Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.
There is much that science doesn’t understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises
I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.
Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.
The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism.
Science, as illustrated by the printing press, the telegraph, the railway, is a double-edged sword. At the same moment that it puts an enormous power in the hands of the good man, it also offers an equal advantage to the evil disposed.
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research.
No matter how much science advances and creates robots, it cannot create a hair which contains DNA.
Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology.
When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.
The universe evolved from something and nothing, and has most of these elemental dualpair until now.
Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course.
Impossibility only lasts until you find new unbelievable hard evidences.
Life off Earth is in two important respects not at all unworldly: you can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments, or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones.
In my opinion, we don’t devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.
The scientist is motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for truth.
Science class is traditionally taught as science history class – you learn all these facts that someone else discovered, which you need to know, but that’s not really an inspiring way to learn science.
One final note on our troglodytes: They breathed fresh air. They drank clean water. They ate organic plants and free-range animals—yet their staggeringly high infant mortality left them with an average life expectancy of barely thirty years. Science matters.
…space flight still had a long way to go to catch up with the safety record of the milkshake industry.
Deux choses sont infinies : l’Univers et la bêtise humaine. Mais, en ce qui concerne l’Univers, je n’en ai pas encore acquis la certitude absolue.
Napoleon, when hearing about Laplace’s latest book, said, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.’Laplace responds, ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. (I had no need of that hypothesis.)
Si l’organisme vivant est un system hiérarchisé dont le niveau d’organisation est au-dessus du niveau chimique, il est alors évident qu’il doit être étudié à tous les niveaux et qu’une recherche limitée à l’un d’entre eux (niveaux chimique par exemple) ne peut remplacer celle effectuée aux niveau supérieurs.
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
Just as the interior structure of our supercluster of galaxies, our galaxy cluster, our galaxy, our local galactic neighborhood, our star, our system of planets, asteroids, and comets, and our Moon differ from the normal pattern in precise ways that favor the possibility of advanced life on Earth, so, too, does Earth’s core.
In the ancient and medieval world, the exploration of physical influences among heavenly bodies, and between the heavenly bodies and objects on earth, was generally called ‘astrology.’ But we must not confuse this with the current socially acceptable form of bigotry that seems to entitle the human beings who believe in it to prejudge the character of others based solely on their dates of birth.
A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.
The strength of the scientific establishment in any country is related to its general level of education, not only in supplying large numbers of eager minds for further training, but also in ensuring a public opinion that holds science in esteem and approves financial support.
In a nutshell, the universe is 4% visible, 23% undetectable and 73% unimaginable. Welcome to the cosmos, full of mass you can measure but not manhandle, driven by a force you can infer but not explain.
I think that prog rock is the science fiction of music. Science fiction speculates on what the future might be and look like and how we’ll get there, and yet there’s always a central theme of humanity, or there should be. Progressive rock has the same concept of exploration into the parts of the music world that hasn’t been explored.
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
No need to be afraid. I’m just a Holon.” “Huh?” “A Holon. What are you?” “You mean who am I?” I correct him. “No, what are you?” “I’m not a what. I’m a who.” “How can you be a who if you’re not a what?” “What?
Wish me good luck, please,” I whisper. “On one condition,” Philemone says. “Remember, what you call luck is the meeting of opportunity and flexibility.” I smile, weakly. “Good luck,” she says. “Now go.
We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
Sometime I’m going to do an essay called ‘The Virtues of Amateurism’ for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It’s a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don’t challenge them.
A man of science has always been much more of a magician than the priest; since he would control the elements rather than submit to the Spirit who is more elementary than the element.
The world changes materially. Science makes advances in technology and understanding. But the world of humanity doesn’t change.
One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.
Freud did nothing more than take science from the laboratory to bed..