We’re not responsible, he thought. This planet is a temporary affair. It’s whizzing with all kinds of other ones, a whole range of planetary stuff, toward a star in the Milky Way. On that kind...

This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of...

Nie można zrozumieć ani życia jednostki, ani życia społeczeństwa, nie odnosząc jednego do drugiego.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

To prove to an indignant questioner on the spur of the moment that the work I do was useful seemed a thankless task and I gave it up. I turned to him with a smile...

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding.

Including matter itself, antimatter

Faraday has the Cage, Tesla has the Coil and Magee has the Sandwich!

Then there is the cosmologist, who views himself as nothing but a manipulation of atoms; his mind configured out of randomness into the tool a vast, blind universe might use to perceive itself. If this...

At what point, 2,000 years on from the life of Jesus, do we need a refresher course? Another 2,000 years? Imagine 100,000 years’ time – would the story of Moses’ burning bush amaze a generation...

See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind … is the one fundamental treason which the scholar’s mind must not...

For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus; for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.

…We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the...

One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the...

This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all...

[Scientific humanism is] the only worldview compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature.

Will it be possible to solve these problems? It is certain that nobody has thus far observed the transformation of dead into living matter, and for this reason we cannot form a definite plan for...

… nothing in Nature is black or white, few solutions are clean and clear; rather, reality, and especially our models of it, possess shades of gray throughout.

The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing...

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth – the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly...

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.

The answer is not relevant to the knowledge of an inquiring mind.

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire’s apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.

To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out...

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

Will Human Nature destroy Nature and Humans?

Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don’t know what it is. Well I do. It’s...

Quite often, when an idea that could be helpful presents itself, we do not appreciate it, for it is so inconspicuous. The expert has, perhaps, no more ideas than the inexperienced, but appreciates more what...

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to...

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

[It] is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of...

Demokratik sistem verdiği sözleri tutmasa da, kamuoyundaki büyük dalgalanmalara karşı duyarsız değildir. Profesyonel siyasal bürokrasimiz bile çoğu üyelerinin yalnızca kendi çıkarını düşünmesine karşın yeniden seçilmek istemektedir ve bu yüzden halkın düşünce ve isteklerini dikkate almak...

✡ Before aligning the body to the future, the mind has to straighten out from the impairment of religion.

Because of its developing medical science infrastructure, medical tourism in India is on the increase. Because it’s cost-effective and affordable, many people from Britain, mainland Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia come to India...

Truth is not as pompous and romantic as myth … but it has the immeasurable value of being the Truth.

Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as...

Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed, it was driven by the need of early scholars to interpret the Qur’an.

He wondered if somewhere far off, defying the laws of science, Mitch’s two screams were still echoing, if those vibrations had traveled into space, if they moved on and on like rays in a light-year....

A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes.

Now I know what the atom looks like.

Many conscientious environmentalists are repelled by the word “abundance,” automatically associating it with irresponsible consumerism and plundering of Earth’s resources. In the context of grassroots frustration, insensitive enthusing about the potential for energy abundance usually...

Science has never found a ghost,

I am serving the purpose for which I was designed, therefore I am satisfied with my existence.

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy,...

Physical reality does not require that we be pleased with its mechanism.

Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can’t explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they’re happening.

In the progressive growth of astronomy, physics or mechanical science was developed, and when this had been, to a certain degree, successfully cultivated, it gave birth to the science of chemistry.

Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role...