No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game. … Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at...

To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies.

Nothing could be more admirable than the manner in which for forty years he [Joseph Black] performed this useful and dignified office. His style of lecturing was as nearly perfect as can well be conceived;...

I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well.

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...

In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history’s inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate...

When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of that universe, every phase of present or past life therein, has been examined, classified, and co-ordinated with the rest, then the mission of science will be...

All of (the habitats) are gone. Aquarius is the last one used for science.

Dearest love, let me count the ways. Dismemberment, garroted, poisoned, drowned, named. I read that as soon as a species is named it begins its travels up the endangered list. Discovery meaning death.

¡Cuán pobre e interiormente mutilado nos resulta un mono, un prosimio o un gran papagayo, acostumbrado a vivir en una jaula, y cómo contrasta con la increíble movilidad, diversión e interés del mismo animal cuando...

Even as dead bugs they are still influencing these forest ecosystems, … Science.

It seems that all eukaryotic cells either have, or once had (and then lost) mitochondria. In other words, possession of mitochondria is a sine qua non of the eukaryotic condition

Since only a narrow range of the allowed values for, say, the fine structure constant will permit observers to exist in the Universe, we must find ourselves in the narrow range of possibilities which permit...

And so from then onwards, Daniel understood that the point of this grueling sundial project was not merely to plot the curve but to understand why each curve was shaped as it was. To put...

There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist—musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn. … No amounts of stone...

He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for...

Science is measurement. Measurement is not science but technology.

We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people’s interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun...

When looking for evidence that something exists, it’s silly to start by assuming that it is impossible. Taking any assumptions into study is bad science.

Predator and prey move in silent gestures, on the seductive dance of death, in the shadows cast by the vultures of the night. ☥

When students cheat on exams it’s because our school system values grades more than students value learning.

It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements which involve its reality are erroneous. Such an assertion involves a far greater departure from the natural position of mankind...

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

They didn’t understand what they were doing.I’m afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.

And to think of this great country in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian legends as the canons of modern culture. Our scientific men are paying for...

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

Remember, I’m the only person her who’s paid to be nice to you. But not too nice. Give me any lip and I’ll break your face. OK?

Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also...

Without ethics, science would be cruelty.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to...

In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character....

I’m taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people....

Das ganze Zeitalter betet das Geld, die Ordnung, das Wissen, Rechnen, Messen und Wägen, alles in allem also den Geist des Geldes und seiner Verwandten an und beklagt es zugleich.

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling...

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

…We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith...

Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).

Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.

To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.

Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define...

Since Pawlow and his pupils have succeeded in causing the secretion of saliva in the dog by means of optic and acoustic signals, it no longer seems strange to us that what the philosopher terms...

If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.

It’s been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they’d win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental...

The technological man is limited as his tools. The man without technologies is limitless.