You have to think if we’ve been visited by extraterrestrial life, it was like a zookeeper walking into the chimp enclosure: He looks around, takes some pictures, then leaves without interacting significantly with the environment....

Toward the end of his book, Miller explains his need to unite science and religion: science does not explain the meaning and purpose of life. That may be, but why should we assume religion explains...

The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.

The mind is more powerful than ever, and you have more control over it than you ever think.

Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel...

The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for...

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are...

Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The...

One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.

The challenge is quite formidable if you spell it out explicitly: artists must look at a three-dimensional scene with their two-dimensional retinas and then generate a two-dimensional painting that appears three-dimensional to viewers who look...

The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to...

There are no things man was not meant to know. There are, perhaps, things man is too dumb to figure out, but that’s a different problem.

The mystic sees God in everything; the scientist, atoms; the poet, poetry.

Science itself, no matter whether it is the search for truth or merely the need to gain control over the external world, to alleviate suffering, or to prolong life, is ultimately a matter of feeling,...

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which...

There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable — unobservable in principle — it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs...

The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours...

If the brain was simple enough to be understood – we would be too simple to understand it!

The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.

Contrary to popular belief, there are peaks higher than Mount Everest. These are the hurdles that lie within each of us. Thank you Stephen Hawking for showing us that they are not insurmountable

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

And, if you’ll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you’ll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just...

Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man’s place in the universe, and as the source of...

An Asetian never tries to talk louder than the crowd surrounding him. An Asetian becomes that crowd.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Chemistry is the dirty part of physics.

Actually, what we really need to remember about Galileo is that most of the people who use his name in argument could barely spell it, let alone tell us what actually happened to the man....

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save...

It is easier to believe that there was nothing before there was something than that there was something before there was nothing.

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is… we cannot expect things to be much better in this world… We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any...

I’m doing now with cornets exactly what I used to do with trilobites: measuring, analyzing and cataloging the myriad gradations of their forms.

If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings in the field of medicine, I have strayed onto paths where the gold...

The fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.1. The energy of the universe is constant.2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

However, as I hope to persuade you, there are some interesting connections between science and magic. They share a belief, as one mathematician put it, that what is visible is merely a superficial reality, not...

That’s something we all want to know, isn’t it? Is there a “purpose” to our form and substance? Or are we simply the random result of billions of years of chemical reactions and accidents influenced...

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

Despite all our amazing ability, ingenuity, technology and industry humans are the one species who have not mastered the art of simplicity.

Science is implausible to untutored human common sense, but that in no way casts doubt on the correctness of well-established scientific findings. Feelings of transcendence are simply that—feelings—and, as such, have no capacity to reveal...

How does it feel to be a part of this beautifully ingenious design. I have faith that there is a chosen moment in which my soul will expand infinitely free from time and space. Some...

Let’s go commit senseless acts of science.

From a philosophical point of view, Leibniz’s most interesting argument was that absolute space conflicted with what he called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). PII says that if two objects are indiscernible,...

Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren’t these the same questions as last year’s [physics] final exam?Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.

In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.

A true anecdote which illustrates his unworldly nature is of the instruction he received in 1922 to appear at Buckingham Palace to receive the accolade of the Order of Knighthood; Bayliss replied that as the...

Science is the poetry of reality.

(On the energy radiated by the Sun)It’s four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked...

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” – John W. Campbell

The appearance of Professor Benjamin Peirce, whose long gray hair, straggling grizzled beard and unusually bright eyes sparkling under a soft felt hat, as he walked briskly but rather ungracefully across the college yard, fitted...

… things are the way they are in our universe because if they Weren’t, we would not be here to notice.