A great discovery solves a great problem, but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Your problem may be modest, but if it challenges your curiosity and brings into play...

(Ivan) Hold your tongue, or I’ll kill you!(The devil) You’ll kill me? No, excuse me, I will speak. I came to treat myself to that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my ardent young...

[At the beginning of modern science], a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must...

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.

George Stephenson, with a sagacity of mind in advance of the science of his day, answered, when asked what was the ultimate cause of motion of his locomotive engine, ‘that it went by the bottled-up...

As additional precautions, Kranz requested that a two-hundred-foot radio antenna (called a deep-space dish) in Australia be added to the global network tracking and communicating with the spacecraft, and that additional computers at the Goddard...

I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker,” he continued, as though he had not heard her. “We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe,...

…on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night...

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws...

Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless...

Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid Deal with it.

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”(p.115)

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

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.

Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, “materialism” would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a...

Cuando uno presta atención a las reacciones del público que visita un parque zoológico, advierte el despilfarro de una piedad sentimental, en la conmiseración que despiertan animales que se encuentran perfectamente, mientras que casi nadie...

The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict...

We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex…..we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their...

There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that...

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place....

Anybody who has been seriously engaged is scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.’ It is...

Black holes are the last vestige of civilizations obsessed with tinkering.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they...

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture… by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated...

He who does not cherish life, does not deserve to be among the living. ☥

… informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between...

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...

If you’ve got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs – rethinking the world isn’t an option.

This may be why Einstein once said; “Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses...

{McCabe on the influential scientist Luther Burbank}His magnificent work, which added an incalculable sum to the wealth of America and left him a comparatively poor man, is well known. His own simple account of his...

We cannot see how the evidence afforded by the unquestioned progressive development of organised existence—crowned as it has been by the recent creation of the earth’s greatest wonder, MAN, can be set aside, or its...

Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

The cell, this elementary keystone of living nature, is far from being a peculiar chemical giant molecule or even a living protein and as such is not likely to fall prey to the field of...

Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were...

At a time India was known as golden bird because of its huge amount of gold assets. Let’s make India once again the same golden bird full of innovation and technology.

Many textbooks point out that no animal has evolved wheels and cite the fact as an example of how evolution is often incapable of finding the optimal solution to an engineering problem. But it is...

Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.

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...

Humanity stands … before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave...

I wondered whether water is a mirror for our darker emotions as much as it is an engine for our happiness. Water quiets all the noise, all the distractions, and connects you to your own...

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...

George Gey paid his way through a biology degree at the University of Pittsburgh by working as a carpenter and mason, and he could make nearly anything for cheap or free. During his second year...

Biot, who assisted Laplace in revising it [The Mécanique Céleste] for the press, says that Laplace himself was frequently unable to recover the details in the chain of reasoning, and if satisfied that the conclusions...

[Asteroids are] the vermin of the skies.[Asteroids can block objects of interest on astronomical photographs.]

As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it’s not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That’s the point. The picture...

I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren’t going to stop me.