What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?

No doctor knows everything. There’s a reason why it’s called “practising” medicine.

You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind–monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison.”What monsters may they...

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you...

The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them,...

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called...

No one, in the world’s whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever...

We are all star stuff.

The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

The tobacco control movement provides a good model for how to achieve massive societal changes. In 1965, over 50 percent of men and 34 percent of women smoked. By 2010, only 23.5 percent of men...

There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: ‘he...

Evidently neither cats nor dogs, nor other animals that listen to human music, were constituted for the appreciation of it, for it is not of the slightest use to them in the struggle for existence....

Man is the interpreter of nature, science the right interpretation.

How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying...

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

The situation with regard to insulin is particularly clear. In many parts of the world diabetic children still die from lack of this hormone. … [T]hose of us who search for new biological facts and...

Science, you don’t know, looks like magic.

When I started this trial, I thought we were going to try this case on science. I had no idea my client would be called a liar.

They had been talking about astrology, a forbidden science that was not pursued in the cloister. Narcissus had said that astrology was an attempt to arrange and order the many different types of human beings...

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century...

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of...

As to the need of improvement there can be no question whilst the reign of Euclid continues. My own idea of a useful course is to begin with arithmetic, and then not Euclid but algebra....

Some guns were fired to give notice that the departure of the balloon was near. … Means were used, I am told, to prevent the great balloon’s rising so high as might endanger its bursting....

The sea in all its vastness is its own, real world. Man is nature’s sci-fi.

Yes, I’m a materialist. I’m willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I’m unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders...

…only one man lived who could understand Gibbs’s papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.

I have been able to solve a few problems of mathematical physics on which the greatest mathematicians since Euler have struggled in vain … But the pride I might have held in my conclusions was...

We get a lot of calls where the person is murdered at home, but is not found for a period of time. And so the animals have already started to take the body apart because...

There is no science without spirituality; spirituality has no meaning without science.

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery’s being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880’s, science played almost...

Will fluorine ever have practical applications?It is very difficult to answer this question. I may, however, say in all sincerity that I gave this subject little thought when I undertook my researches, and I believe...

The belief that the world was created yesterday seems to hold great appeal to those born at that time.

a discussion about the miraculous quickly devolves to an argument about whether or not one is willing to consider any possibility whatsoever of the supernatural

These scientific studies countervail the influential claims of the Kants, Nietzsches, and Rands about the nature of human goodness. Compassion is not a blind emotions that catapults people pell-mell toward the next warm body that...

To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.

The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is...

Eve and the apple was the first great step in experimental science.

life is either a reproducible, almost commonplace manifestation of matter, given certain conditions, or a miracle. Too many steps are involved to allow for something in between.

The problem with ID, of course, is that it leaves open the possibility that the intelligence behind nature may have a moral interest in us, having communicated already with humanity in the past, and might...

Umut yok olduğunda, yaşam olgusal ya da gizil (potansiyel) olarak sona ermiştir. Umut, yaşamın doğasında, insan ruhunun dinamiğinde varolan bir öğedir. Yaşamın doğasını oluşturan bir başka öğeye çok yakından bağlıdır. Bu öge, inanç’dır.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption...

Without causality in the world, there is no point in educating people, or making any moral or political appeal.

Science has made many advances in my lifetime, but the instrument has yet to be invented that can see clearly into the marriage of a man and a woman.

You make experiments and I make theories. Do you know the difference? A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made...

For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms...

A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth’s atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth’s external crust, and finally of the origin and development of...

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the ‘social sciences’ is: some do, some don’t.