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.

Research on the human brain has shown it is predisposed to think in the terms of a story.36 This predisposition is continuously reinforced and strengthened throughout the life of your brain. Imaging studies have shown...

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...

Life is chemistry, not biology.

Every creature is a living instruction that runs the algorithm of nature.

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

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

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...

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...

Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.

Facts do not fall in the face of discomfort.

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon...

The building blocks of Life are made up of shapes and spaces.

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

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

What caused me to undertake the catalog was the nebula I discovered above the southern horn of Taurus on September 12, 1758, while observing the comet of that year. … This nebula had such a...

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...

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

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

The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to nothing.[Statement of the second law of thermodynamics, 1862]

Religion is the subjective experience. Science is the objective reality. To argue either is a ridiculous waste of time and energy.

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...

When you talk with people, one of the arguments they’ll throw back at you is that the climate has always changed, and that is absolutely right. It’s the rate of change that is the problem...

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms,...

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history… It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate...

Oh! to shoot for the stars if feels right. Aim for my heart if it feels right.

How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/’woo’], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education...

Le Verrier—without leaving his study, without even looking at the sky—had found the unknown planet [Neptune] solely by mathematical calculation, and, as it were, touched it with the tip of his pen!

Force,” they make a barber’s block,Ready to put onMeanings most strange and various, fit to shockPupils of Newton….The phrases of last century in thisLinger to play tricks—Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:—Those long-nebbed...

Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional...

Health is wealth but being wealthy does not mean one is healthy.

Science and Spirituality are two ends and you have to keep yourself at the middle. Science guys will call it, equilibrium.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. … At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex...

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on...

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...

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

Science doesn’t claim to have absolute certainty about the world; it creates models that provide the best explanation based on the available evidence. If additional evidence is found, the model can be changed.

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

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Science can make a heart beat with ventilator, but there is only one power that makes it live, that is LOVE which is the purest form of FAITH.

So there were two worlds: the perceived world, a dimension of adjectives, equations and brush strokes, a surface dazzling with our efforts to render it, but ultimately bearing only our own reflections; and the impenetrable...

Chance” is just a word expressing ignorance

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The cause of nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole but in the separate elementary parts—the cells.

Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.

There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended upon their prompt...

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.

We have written the equations of water flow. From experiment, we find a set of concepts and approximations to use to discuss the solution–vortex streets, turbulent wakes, boundary layers. When we have similar equations in...

The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds…. It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental...