Science Quotes

But what are facts, really, except things we’ve already proven? There could be lots of almost-facts out there, still waiting for proof.

~ Kathryn Reiss

Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.

~ Robert Woodrow Wilson

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.]

~ C.p. Snow

Using information about animal behavior to justify social or political ideology is wrong . . . People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without having to worry about keeping up with the bonobos.

~ Marlene Zuk

The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.

~ Lara Santoro

In space you don't stop.

~ Christopher Carosa

One particular aspect of Siddhartha’s revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm’s length from multiplicity.

~ Daniel Tammet

In the firmament of science Mayer and Joule constitute a double star, the light of each being in a certain sense complementary to that of the other.

~ John Tyndall

[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.

~ René Descartes

[Henry Cavendish] fixed the weight of the earth; he established the proportions of the constituents of the air; he occupied himself with the quantitative study of the laws of heat; and lastly, he demonstrated the nature of water and determined its volumetric composition. Earth, air, fire, and water—each and all came within the range of his observations.

~ Thomas Edward Thorpe

One of the great commandments of science is, Mistrust arguments from authority. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude.

~ Carl Sagan

Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

~ John C. Polanyi

There is no greater hiding place for a secret than within the mind of a madman.

~ Alexander Ferrick

Valkyrie stood there and waited for her to start making sense.There is a vegetable-plant hybrid we've been working on, modifying the genes and receptors, mutating the proteins and acids so that they are, in effect, neurotransmitters. Our work on the synapses alone has been quite illuminating.Valkyrie stood there and waited for her to start making sense.

~ Derek Landy

The coast redwood is the tallest species of tree on earth. The tallest redwoods today are between 350 and close to 380 feet in height--thirty-five to thirty-eight stories tall. The crown of a tree is its radiant array of limbs and branches, covered with leaves. The crowns of the tallest redwoods can sometimes look like the plume of exhaust from a rocket taking off.

~ Richard Preston

... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.

~ Richard Preston

The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in a ruined world ...

~ Richard Preston

The coast redwood is a so-called relict species. It is a tiny remnant of a life form that once spread in splendor and power across the face of nature. The redwood has settled down in California to live near the sea, the way many retired people do.

~ Richard Preston

I dream of a world where Science shapes the structure of a society, rather than politics.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The church and the scientific community are fighting at times a common enemy: the truth religion cannot deny and the positivist materialist scientist is unable to explain.

~ Paul Greene

To embrace the belief that man is the accidental product of a random and otherwise genetically and biologically impossible Darwinian gradual evolution allegedly monitored by a quasi-fictitious natural selection, a process that supposedly started with an amoeba nobody knows how it arrived on Earth that somehow became a fish with stumps for legs that turned crocodile, a creature that following successive transmutations “evolved” into an ape that ended up as Leonardo Da Vinci is an attitude that comes in conflict with the scientific method of research and it certainly violates its standard principles.

~ Paul Greene

Religion thrives on want and fear of the unknown, on lack of education. A frightened and confused human is fed by religious institutions with the illusion that the solution to his real problems is to appeal to the good will of an imaginary supernatural divinity religious institutions claim to represent. With one hand they offer a cup of rice and a pair of used shoes someone else has paid for. With the other, they place the Bible on the table, setting up the poor in spirit for the belief trap.

~ Paul Greene

Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.

~ Paul Greene

That everything in nature has “the appearance” of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else.

~ Paul Greene

… between the irrational promoted in churches and the Darwinian pseudo-science taught in schools, a revolution in the way we understand reality is not only necessary but also long overdue.

~ Paul Greene

The chemists who uphold dualism are far from being agreed among themselves; nevertheless, all of them in maintaining their opinion, rely upon the phenomena of chemical reactions. For a long time the uncertainty of this method has been pointed out: it has been shown repeatedly, that the atoms put into movement during a reaction take at that time a new arrangement, and that it is impossible to deduce the old arrangement from the new one. It is as if, in the middle of a game of chess, after the disarrangement of all the pieces, one of the players should wish, from the inspection of the new place occupied by each piece, to determine that which it originally occupied.

~ Auguste Laurent

A mouse can fall down a mine shaft a third of a mile deep without injury. A rat falling the same distance would break his bones; a man would simply splash ... Elephants have their legs thickened to an extent that seems disproportionate to us, but this is necessary if their unwieldy bulk is to be moved at all ... A 60-ft. man would weigh 1000 times as much as a normal man, but his thigh bone would have its area increased by only 100 times ... Consequently such an unfortunate monster would break his legs the moment he tried to

~ John Scott Haldane

Simplify? Let me try. In school days, we are taught that if there are four animals in a room and you add two more, the total will be six. That is logic. But behind this logic, there are underlying assumptions. Now, if somebody tells you, there are four rats in the room and if you add two more cats in the room, how many animals in total exist in the room now? The answer will depend upon assumption. If you just use your mathematical brain, you will say six animals. If you use your human brain, you will say two animals. Why two animals? Because the two cats will eat the four rats in no time.

~ Ravindra Shukla

Let us hope that Lysenko's success in Russia will serve for many generations to come as another reminder to the world of how quickly and easily a science can be corrupted when ignorant political leaders deem themselves competent to arbitrate scientific disputes.

~ Martin Gardner

The wolf reintroduction has gone so well that, somewhat ironically, the wolves are now threatened by their own success. Indeed, virtually all the conditions for strong public support that were evident in the early years of the program remain intact. The scientific and economic studies cited above support the original predictions of benefits, and agency officials remain committed to the policy. Yet some political actors remain hostile to the program. As NPS management assistant Sacklin said, No amount of good science will stop a politician.

~ William R. Lowry

He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has no use but by which their conversation profits.

~ Marcel Proust

In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.

~ Jacques Monod

All science is either Physics or stamp-collecting.

~ Lord Kelvin

As far as the laws of Mathematics refer to reality they are not certain and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality.

~ Albert Einstein

He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.

~ H. G. Wells

I am sorry to say there is too much point to the wise crack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

~ John F. Kennedy

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

~ George Santayana

If the human race wants to go to Hell in a basket technology can help it get there by jet.

~ Charles M. Allen

In science all facts no matter how trivial or banal enjoy democratic equality.

~ Mary Mccarthy

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

~ James Jeans