[When asked why are numbers beautiful?]It’s like asking why is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing...

presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the...

The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.

…the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today’s atmosphere is almost entirely the result of photosynthetic living, which had...

It is safer to face a strong enemy in the field of battle, than to fight a war by the side of a weak friend.

Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all.No judgment implied. Just an observation.

More about the selection theory: Jerne meant that the Socratic idea of learning was a fitting analogy for ‘the logical basis of the selective theories of antibody formation’: Can the truth (the capability to synthesize...

and be guided by a likewise rational ethic of human concern. You must do your utmost as individuals to improve your understanding, ability and compassion.

As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving...

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from...

Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to the shimmering red presence in the clear night sky…

A lot of who you were in middle age was determined before you had a chance to manipulate, control, or eve understand the things around you. It was no mystery, he thought, why some old...

Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.

Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton’s time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true...

I am one of those who think, like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new...

Like rain drops dripping on the floor like a thousand drumists beating those drums repeatedly,My blood runs through my veins ninety nine point nine metres per second when i think of you.

I had this terrible nightmare; I dreamt I was a politician and they were dragging me off to parliament

The progress of science has always been the result of a close interplay between our concepts of the universe and our observations on nature. The former can only evolve out of the latter and yet...

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...

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

Never memorize something that you can look up.

I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always...

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly...

In this modern day, when only what we see is allowed to have certainity, and when scientific data seems to hold the trump card for truth, when only what can be measured exists, love defies...

Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines...

Despite the Great Chain of Being’s traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow ‘aimed’ at humans, or that humans are ‘evolution’s...

I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. The best sprinters in...

Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main...

We all love a good story. We all love a tantalizing mystery. We all love the underdog pressing onward against seemingly insurmountable odds. We all, in one form or another, are trying to make sense...

Nature’s stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.

Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.

THE QUESTION IS, OF COURSE, IS IT GOING TO BE POSSIBLE TO AMALGAMATE EVERYTHING,AND MERELY DISCOVER THAT THIS WORLD REPRESENTS DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF ONE THING?

Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of our nation.

I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and...

Those, therefore, who effect to despise “profane” Science are themselves despicable. It is their own incapacity for true Thought of any serious kind, their vanity and pertness; nay more also! their own subconsciousness sense of...

I told [John Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted ‘Mary had...

Worship us or we perish.” A dethroned monarch may retain some of his human dignity while driving a taxi for a living. But a god without his thunderbolt is a poor object.

The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science

Dream is not that which you see while sleeping it is something that does not let you sleep.

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

Homeopathy is the true and very advanced healing science much beyond the scope of current methods of chemical analysis and interpretation.” – Dr. Aditya Sardana

[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which...

When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of...

Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being...

WATNEY: Look! A pair of boobs! -> (.Y.).

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life – all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our...

It appears now to be universally admitted that, before the exile, the Israelites had no belief in rewards and punishments after death, nor in anything similar to the Christian heaven and hell; but our story...

We all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I’m saying is, you don’t have to make stories up, you don’t have...

…”science” as defined in our culture has a philosophical bias that needs to be exposed. On the one hand, science is empirical. This means that scientists rely on experiments, observations and calculations to develop theories...