Science Quotes

“The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition.”

“Past is PrologueThis book was written observing the premise that the seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims justice, or rob the living of a future. Generations of historians have enthusiastically gone about their craft knowing full well that 'he who owns the past, owns the future'. Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices.”

“What one person calls miracle, I call nature.”

“Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.”

“In the statistical gargon used in psychology, p refers to the probability that the difference you see between two groups (of introverts and extroverts, say, or males and females) could have occurred by chance. As a general rule, psychologists report a difference between two groups as 'significant' if the probability that it could have occurred by chance is 1 in 20, or less. The possibility of getting significant results by chance is a problem in any area of research, but it's particularly acute for sex differences research. Supppose, for example, you're a neuroscientist interested in what parts of the brain are involved in mind reading. You get fifteen participants into a scanner and ask them to guess the emotion of people in photographs. Since you have both males and females in your group, you rin a quick check to ensure that the two groups' brains respond in the same way. They do. What do you do next? Most likely, you publish your results without mentioning gender at all in your report (except to note the number of male and female participants). What you don't do is publish your findings with the title "No Sex Differences in Neural Circuitry Involved in Understanding Others' Minds." This is perfectly reasonable. After all, you weren't looking for gender difference and there were only small numbers of each sex in your study. But remember that even if males and females, overall, respond the same way on a task, five percent of studies investigating this question will throw up a "significant" difference between the sexes by chance. As Hines has explained, sex is "easily assessed, routinely evaluated, and not always reported. Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published." This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that do find sex differences get published, but those that don't languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher's file drawer.”

“Your reality is a reflection of yourself”

“He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.”

“My doggy ate my homework.He chewed it up," I said.But when I offered my excuseMy teacher shook her head. I saw this wasn't going well.I didn't want to fail.Before she had a chance to talk,I added to the tale:"Before he ate, he took my workAnd tossed it in a pot.He simmered it with succotashTill it was piping hot."He scrambled up my science notesWith eggs and bacon strips,Along with sautéed spelling wordsAnd baked potato chips."He then took my arithmetic And had it gently fried.He broiled both my book reports With pickles on the side."He wore a doggy apronAs he cooked a notebook stew.He barked when I objected.There was nothing I could do.""Did he wear a doggy chef hat?"My teacher gave a scowl."He did," I said. "And taking itWould only make him growl."My teacher frowned, but then I said As quickly as I could,"He covered it with ketchup, And he said it tasted good.""A talking dog who likes to cook?" My teacher had a fit.She sent me to the office, And that is where I sit.I guess I made a big mistake In telling her all that.'Cause I don't have a doggy. It was eaten by my cat.”

“The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds”

“He was following the Earth through its days, drifting with the rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight.”

“Trees live in symbiosis with hyphae (fungus/mold roots). A tea spoon of dirt contains kilometers of these roots. One species can spread throughout entire forests over centuries. They exchange nutrients with trees, along with information about insects, drought and other dangers. It's like a 'wood wide web'.”

“In the first case it emerges that the evidence that might refute a theory can often be unearthed only with the help of an incompatible alternative: the advice (which goes back to Newton and which is still popular today) to use alternatives only when refutations have already discredited the orthodox theory puts the cart before the horse. Also, some of the most important formal properties of a theory are found by contrast, and not by analysis. A scientist who wishes to maximize the empirical content of the views he holds and who wants to understand them as clearly as he possibly can must therefore introduce other views; that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. He must compare ideas with other ideas rather than with 'experience' and he must try to improve rather than discard the views that have failed in the competition. Proceeding in this way he will retain the theories of man and cosmos that are found in Genesis, or in the Pimander, he will elaborate them and use them to measure the success of evolution and other 'modern' views. He may then discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis. Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others in greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Nothing is ever settled, no view can ever be omitted from a comprehensive account. Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius, and not Dirac or von Neumann, are the models for presenting a knowledge of this kind in which the history of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself - it is essential for its further development as well as for giving content to the theories it contains at any particular moment. Experts and laymen, professionals and dilettani, truth-freaks and liars - they all are invited to participate in the contest and to make their contribution to the enrichment of our culture. The task of the scientist, however, is no longer 'to search for the truth', or 'to praise god', or 'to synthesize observations', or 'to improve predictions'. These are but side effects of an activity to which his attention is now mainly directed and which is 'to make the weaker case the stronger' as the sophists said, and thereby to sustain the motion of the whole.”

“What is a philosophy? It Is an answer satisfactory to the reason to all the great problems of life. That is what is meant by philosophy. It must satisfy the reason, and it must show the unity underlying the endless diversity of the facts that science observes.”

“I wasn't born an artist. I was really good in science as a kid. I probably shouldn't have been an artist because I'm much more interested in science. But I was raised by artists. I can't really escape it.”

“The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.”

“The World is an organization that was created for peacekeeping and management of this land. Its origin and science easily exceeds the civilization on the surface. This ship was provided to us by the World, and we're responsible for its operations.”

“Lifespan extension has never really been a goal of aging science, nor should it.”

“I am a science fiction enthusiast, really, deep down.”

“We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore earth, born too early to explore space.”

“Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.”