Realizing its fundamental importance in understanding spectral lines, in atomic physics and in the theory of how light and electrons interact, quantum electrodynamics, Pauli and Heisenberg were determined to derive it from quantum theory rather...

Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?

Today will still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a...

Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find...

Before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned—the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted—nature’s answer must be...

…reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge … as an attempt by our...

That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me — actually more...

Most people thought he was insane when he looked up into the sky with a simple handmade telescope and cried out that the Earth revolves around the Sun, because this was four years ago.

There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter into our civil affairs, our government soon...

The zoologist is delighted by the differences between animals, whereas the physiologist would like all animals to work in fundamentally the same way.

Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes… The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it...

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light...

{Replying to G. H. Hardy’s suggestion that the number of a taxi (1729) was ‘dull’, showing off his spontaneous mathematical genius}No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a...

Log Entry: SOL 118My conversation with NASA about the Water Reclaimer was boring and riddled with technical details. So I’ll paraphrase for you:Me: “This is obviously a clog. How about I take it apart and...

Science is the manifestation of a fraction of human potential.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates;...

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

War technology is science in the service of obscene anatomical vandalism.

I don’t think science is hard to teach because humans aren’t ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don’t have the brainpower to grapple with...

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker...

During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast...

understanding the essence of things,” matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly...

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the...

Emotional states are fairly quick bursts of neuronal gossip. Traits, on the other hand, are more like the neuronal equivalent of committed relationships.

For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant … 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated...

[Sire,] je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.”En répondant Napoléon qui lui demanda pourquoi sa théorie de l’univers ne indique pas Dieux.

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult...

Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals, but, however unwilling the partizans of the Christian system may be to believe or to acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the...

A story about the Jack Spratts of medicine [was] told recently by Dr. Charles H. Best, co-discoverer of insulin. He had been invited to a conference of heart specialists in North America. On the eve...

There is a saying in the medical profession ‘Inside everytablet is a little bit of poison’. Avoid medications if you can.

What use was time to those who’d soon achieve Digital Immortality?

Vũ trụ có một ý nghĩa, và chính con người, khi hiểu nó, đã trao cho nó cái ý nghĩa đó.

‘Healing,” Papa would tell me, ”is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”

[In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define ‘serendipity’ as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you...

One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves...

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise...

Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive.

Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of...

The earth in its rapid motion round the sun possesses a degree of living force so vast that, if turned into the equivalent of heat, its temperature would be rendered at least one thousand times...

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of ‘proving theorems.’ Is a writer’s job mainly that of ‘writing sentences?

His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science.{Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age...

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any...

The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution…was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in “The evolutionary...

Majority thinks that philosophy is useless not because of being completely uninterested in philosophical questions. In contrast, they would like to know at least from where they came, why they live and what will happen...

There is safety in numbers. And science. Clone your way to being safe. Nobody can protect you like you. And you and you and you.

[Yet for a state such as Washington, which has no personal income tax and takes nearly half of its revenue from sales taxes, a dramatic decrease in its tax base would spell disaster.] Sixty percent...

Maybe you who condemn me are in greater fear than I who am condemned.

Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the...