I often considered whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement of circles.
Its the fate of all creators: They fall in love with their creations.
Civilization, society, is like a playground once you’re hyper aware
Gandhi, the greatest political genius of our time, has pointed the way. He was shown of what sacrifices people are capable once they have found the right way. His work for the liberation of India is a living testimony to the fact that a will governed by firm conviction is stronger than a seemingly invincible material power.
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, ‘Seek simplicity and distrust it.
One has to grow old to understand the functioning of science. Then one may remember the papers which a long time ago aroused great interest and one may compare them to the present-day textbooks. […] History becomes smooth, too smooth in writing. Right starts are forgotten, wrong expeditions into the desert disappear without a trace. Only a few papers will be cited.
A Jesuit retreat master once said, Sooner or later the mind conforms to the truth. When it comes to human conduct and the condition of the planet, the sooner the better.
They didn’t understand what they were doing.I’m afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.
During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast generalization. At the present juncture, it is obviously very doubtful whether this task could be accomplished in a similar way, even by a mind with gifts so peculiarly suited for the purpose as Humboldt’s was, and if all his time and work were devoted to the purpose.
The focus on the future and individualism as we know it will cease to exist.
In many ways science has not yet caught up to social media in its ability to disseminate information. Many scientists prefer traditional media sources. Our means of communicating scientific information are still mostly modeled after means of communication that are now largely dead.
The richest 1 percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the people who make up the poorest half of humanity.
What does this mean? Simply that to make DNA, you have to have DNA in the first place! You have to have the DNA code within the cell before you can make more DNA code. Without the complete code in the first place, there is no way to make the code necessary for every living cell!
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents… some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science.
Ultimately, bridging the practice of forensic science and the public’s need for story may be difficult. We crave narrative, order from chaos, a mystery solved, good guys winning out over the bad ones. But science, and forensic science, should be more neutral and, thus, more nuanced.
You want to know what I love about the moon?…It gives me perspective. The moon was here when Earth was still forming. She is billions of years old and still there. She can be testy sometimes, and why not? She’s been hit with blow after blow. But she still rises. Still stands strong. She’s truly beautiful, in all her phases.
From the moment Ebola enters your bloodstream, the war is already lost, you are almost certainly doomed. You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.
I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did.
To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, ‘How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?’ The honest answer is, I don’t know.
There are 2.5 million ants for each human being, and the dominant, no-questions-asked majority are female.
The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, he believes, the less chance it will have of solving humanity’s greatest challenges.
Science is telling us that we can do phenomenal things if we put our minds and our resources to it.
Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it’s a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.
Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.
When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies, they reach first for the language of autonomy, fairness, and individual rights. But this part of our moral vocabulary does not equip us to address the hardest questions posed by cloning, designer children, and genetic engineering.
It’s a fine line between magic and science. In medieval times, science was magic.
Some researchers seem never able to finish, thinking they have to keep working until their paper, dissertation, or book is perfect. That perfect paper has never been written and never will be. All you can do is to make yours as good as you can in the time available. When you’ve done that, you can say to yourself: Reader, after my best efforts, here’s what I believe—not the whole or final truth, but a truth important to me and I hope to you.
Adam and Eve had first-hand empirical evidence of God’s existence. He walked in the Garden with them. Their problem was that God told them they could not eat of a certain tree. – p. 113
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
Like kudzu, we have been stamped as something to shun. Like kudzu, we have thrived in areas we are unwanted, despite resistance to our existence. Like kudzu, we have persisted.
We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.
Scientific advancement should aim to affirm and to improve human life.
It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.
There is an erroneous idea that while scientists are always open-minded and searching for new ways to see truth, people of faith think they have it all figured out—they believe they know the final truth, the dogma that cannot change. In reality, open-minded people are open-minded about science and faith, and close-minded people are dogmatic about both.
If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. … Choose science.
[Birds’] lives parallel our own in so many ways and are so filled with humorous and tragic incidents as to fascinate us when once we have learned to observe them intelligently. If only we could sit down and talk things over with any one of them, I am sure that bird would be a valued friend for life.
I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
Economists agree about economics – and that’s a science – and they disagree about economic policy because that’s a value judgment… I’ve had profound disagreements on policy with the famous Milton Friedman. But, on economics, we agree.
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
If Christianity is not scientific, and Science is not of God, then there is no invariable law, and truth becomes an accident.
Science must be antidogmatic. Only the church can be dogmatic. It would be better for the church to become more scientific and less dogmatic to better understand what God is before representing something created by man, not by God, in words written by man, not by God.
Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men.
The phrase ‘popular science’ has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.
When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said: In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthropologists who were writing about the history of their subject. I believed that I could add some balance to American anthropological history, and that the best place to start was with museums—where the story began. The more I delved into the archives, the more I was fascinated. I was hooked.
After some of the largest volcanic eruptions in Earth history desecrated ecosystems, dinosaurs became more diverse, more abundant, and larger. Completely new dinosaur species were evolving and spreading into new environments, while other groups of animals went extinct. As the world was going to hell, dinosaurs were thriving, somehow taking advantage of the chaos around them.
Is that a microscope?” I ask, looking at the array of glass slides, tweezers, and eye droppers next to what is definitely a microscope. “Please tell me you’re not playing doctor in the living room.”“We’re playing scientist, dummy,” Joey says.“I’m showing him what different stuff looks like under magnification.”“I looked at a dust mite,” Joey says. “I am not okay.
Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the earth.[Stating how planets supporting life cannot be rare.]
Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb.
Having only indirect evidence is a less than satisfactory way of accepting new realities, but it has a noble tradition in science. Consider atoms.
In the new century science will defeat famine, boredom, and the plague, but . . . vital knowledge will become so elevated that nobody will know how anything works. . . . the good news is that everybody will be empowered; the bad news is nobody will understand why.
The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.I hadn’t known that, I said. I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.There might as well be, Arsibalt said, but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.
Science is difficult and slow no matter who you are. The hours are long, and the glorious ‘aha’ days come only very infrequently. You have to keep believing that if you put in the hours, those days will indeed come!
In a world in transition, students and teachers both need to teach themselves one essential skill – learning how to learn.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.