Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks...

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons...

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to...

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth – scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books – might easily conclude that we are intent...

IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.

No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that’s one of its functions – so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.

Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of “inspiration.” It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge — that is to say,...

The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these...

We determined that this is a grave misconduct that damages the foundation of science.

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the...

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the...

As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25...

The whole point of science is to help people sort out conflicting science, and nowhere is there more conflicting claims than in the area of diet, … It’s important to bring together good scientists. Good...

There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

{Comment to Delambre on chemist Antoine Lavoisier’s execution during the French Revolution}Only a moment to cut off that head and a hundred years may not give us another like it.

The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research.

At first sight nothing seems more obvious than that everything has a beginning and an end, and that everything can be subdivided into smaller parts. Nevertheless, for entirely speculative reasons the philosophers of Antiquity, especially...

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

People tend to think that mathematicians always work in sterile conditions, sitting around and staring at the screen of a computer, or at a ceiling, in a pristine office. But in fact, some of the...

There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, “spirits.” Methyl alcohol, they called “wood spirit”; ethyl alcohol, “wine spirit.” Even today, alcoholic beverages...

The first step to Happiness is deciding exactly what kind of life you want. That kinda comes from experience.

ORGANIC LIFE beneath the shoreless wavesWas born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;First, forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;These, as successive generations bloom,New powers acquire, and larger...

Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy...

Derrière la série de Fourier, d’autres séries analogues sont entrées dans la domaine de l’analyse; elles y sont entrees par la même porte; elles ont été imaginées en vue des applications.After the Fourier series, other...

There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity’s original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly...

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the...

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be...

Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.

Moreover, knowledge and investigation help promote wonder they do not destroy it. Whatever our tastes, we can generally appreciate such things as music, art or wine better when we understand a bit about them. We...

It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its use for the magic opening of the temple doors, when the priests lit the fires on the altars, to...

La pensée n’est qu’un écliar au milieu d’une longue nuit. Mais c’est cet éclair qui est tout.Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night. But this flash means everything.

…in pure mathematics the mind deal only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have not been derived from any source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers...

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look...

Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy’s main source of problems. That is why it is of...

Humanity cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps; there is no such thing as spontaneous generation; life does not come from crystals; poetry does not come from donkeys; international peace does not come from wars;...

Today the earth speaks with resonance and clearness and every ear in every civilized country of the world is attuned to its wonderful message of the creative evolution of man, except the ear of William...

There is in the chemist a form of thought by which all ideas become visible in the mind as strains of an imagined piece of music. This form of thought is developed in Faraday in...

Scientists are those who change facts

Davranışı yönlendiren itici güçleri bilirsek, yalnızca şimdiki zamanda gerçekleştirilen davranışı anlamakla kalmayız, bir kişinin değiştirilmiş koşullar altında nasıl davranabileceği konusunda da akla uygun varsayımlarda bulunabiliriz.

Sure, at some level scientists know nanobots will destroy mankind. They just can’t resist seeing how it happens.

Le regard analytique et le regard intuitif sur la vie ne peuvent s’harmoniser dans un même être que dans la mesure où le premier est subordonné au second. C’est du second, et notamment du sentiment...

Society is indeed a contract. … It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.

The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost...

THESE ARE THE REASONS, THEN, FOR WHICH A MAN CAN BE CONFIDENT ABOUT THE FATE OF HIS SOUL – AS LONG AS IN LIFE HE HAS…DEVOTED HIMSELF TO THE PLEASURES OF AQUIRING KNOWLEDGE …WITH SELF...

Many of the innovations in science and philosophy have come from unbelievers, some of whom died for their ‘unbeliefs.’ Without unbelief, we might well be living in the Dark Ages or at least in the...

At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchhoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchhoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the...

The question of the relation between modernity and postmodernity revolves around the issue of ‘legitimation.’ Modernity, then, appeals to science to legitimate its claim – and by ‘science’ we simply mean the notion of a...