History is the guess of old men, sometimes they get it wrong.

If the weight comes from bacon you can so deduct it off the scale total to get your true weight. #science

Night had fallen, and Diane admired the deep sky behind Steve’s calm countenance. They looked into each other’s eyes again and felt the spark and excitement of discovery. As if to celebrate the perfect, life-enabling distance of the earth from the sun, Diane and Steve kissed again.””-The Grand Unified Story (a Short Story) from Stories...

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero...

It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, there’s a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don’t they?

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

Full spectrum lights should be used in all daytime offices for good health.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

Amazin’.’ he said again. ‘He just looks as though he’s thinking, right?”Er…yes.”But he’s not actually thinking?”Er…no.”So…he just gives the impression of thinking but really it’s just a show?”Er…yes.’Just like everyone else, then really,’ said Ridcully

There exists indeed an opposition to it [building of UVA, Jefferson’s secular college] by the friends of William and Mary, which is not strong. The most restive is that of the priests of the different religious sects, who dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light; and scowl on it the...

John Muir, Earth — planet, Universe[Muir’s home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal]

Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics.

discovery” of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.

[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns…We are now…only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that…such...

It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.

IF”—then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein’s equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.

How much?” We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.

The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to the use of the classical field concept)cannot bring us nearer to this goal. To reach it, we shall, presumably, have...

When you are loved, you can do anything in creation.

As Mollie said to Dailey in the 1890s: “I am told that there are five other Mollie Fanchers, who together, make the whole of the one Mollie Fancher, known to the world; who they are and what they are I cannot tell or explain, I can only conjecture.” Dailey described five distinct Mollies, each with...

It has been argued that close attention to the history of science is indispensable for doing good philosophy of science.

It must be admitted that scientists today take little interest in philosophy of science…. It is not an indication that philosophical issues are no longer relevant. Rather, it is a consequence of the increasingly specialized nature of science, and of the polarization between the sciences and humanities that characterizes the modern education system.

The Yoga science is today being probed by physicists and others in Western countries.

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

We half-eat cookies and drink the milk, we leave notes, all so kids will believe in something that isn’t true. Kids try their best to scientifically determine whether Santa’s real and our whole culture feeds them false evidence. We dupe them.

I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost in. Yet, wait a moment. Television is not the...

There was, I think, a feeling that the best science was that done in the simplest way. In experimental work, as in mathematics, there was ‘style’ and a result obtained with simple equipment was more elegant than one obtained with complicated apparatus, just as a mathematical proof derived neatly was better than one involving laborious...

What is the point of living?

Parthenogenesis means never having your mother tell you to stop doing that or you’ll go blind.

Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their models. They seemed to think that if the atoms were arranged in the right order and about the right distance apart, that was all that mattered, that no further restrictions...

It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Buck story: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.

Science and Spirituality are two sides of the same coin and we cannot separate one from the other. Science is trying to find the truth in an objective or physical manner where as spirituality tries it subjectively or metaphysically.

Even if the intelligent design of some structure has been established, it still is a separate question whether a wise, powerful, and beneficent God ought to have designed a complex, information-rich structure one way or another. For the sake of argument, let’s grant that certain designed structures are not simply, as Gould put it, “odd”...

Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design – as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does – because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether...

The valuable attributes of research men are conscious ignorance and active curiosity.

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of...

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

You know that song, ‘Woodstock.’ It says ‘We are stardust.’ And we are. We come from stardust. Everything on earth is just ashes.

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when...

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no...

Despite all our amazing ability, ingenuity, technology and industry humans are the one species who have not mastered the art of simplicity.

What a deep [trust] in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!

Science discovered long ago that carbon is a source of life. The ashes of my faith have prepared the ground for the planting of seeds that have produced new forms of truth, morality and meaning on my own terms, not according to the dogma laid down by religious ruffians or a vengeful God. If, as...

This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity’s turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left – indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature...

It can even be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to profit from it or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it. The example of the discoveries of Nobel...

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie...

We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.