A Who’s Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our...

My dear nephew was only in his sixth year when I came to be detached from the family circle. But this did not hinder John and I from remaining the most affectionate friends, and many...

The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on.

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.

The fact that Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment, is nowhere better illustrated than in the two fields for slight contributions to which you have done me the great honour of...

The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we’ll need the wisdom of the old Einstein — humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens...

Mankind needs new law to embrace new science.

Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical...

No old Men (excepting Dr. Wallis) love Mathematicks.

The word ‘proof’ should strictly only be used when we are dealing with deductive inferences…. Popper claimed that scientists only need to use deductive inferences…. So if a scientist is only interested in demonstrating that...

If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes…...

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a...

So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal’s wager. But on second thoughts it seems...

Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star.

The evidence never seemed to matter to those in power, who had already made up their minds and did what people typically do when their worldview is threatened by new data: they attacked the messenger.

The capital … shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year. … One-fifth to...

In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: “I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the ‘Chinese Resaturant Problem’–because we has a dim sun.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Realizing its fundamental importance in understanding spectral lines, in atomic physics and in the theory of how light and electrons interact, quantum electrodynamics, Pauli and Heisenberg were determined to derive it from quantum theory rather...

Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?

Today will still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a...

Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find...

Before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned—the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted—nature’s answer must be...

…reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge … as an attempt by our...

That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me — actually more...

Most people thought he was insane when he looked up into the sky with a simple handmade telescope and cried out that the Earth revolves around the Sun, because this was four years ago.

There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter into our civil affairs, our government soon...

The zoologist is delighted by the differences between animals, whereas the physiologist would like all animals to work in fundamentally the same way.

Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes… The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it...

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light...

{Replying to G. H. Hardy’s suggestion that the number of a taxi (1729) was ‘dull’, showing off his spontaneous mathematical genius}No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a...

Log Entry: SOL 118My conversation with NASA about the Water Reclaimer was boring and riddled with technical details. So I’ll paraphrase for you:Me: “This is obviously a clog. How about I take it apart and...

Science is the manifestation of a fraction of human potential.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates;...

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

War technology is science in the service of obscene anatomical vandalism.

I don’t think science is hard to teach because humans aren’t ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don’t have the brainpower to grapple with...

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker...

During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast...

understanding the essence of things,” matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly...

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the...

Emotional states are fairly quick bursts of neuronal gossip. Traits, on the other hand, are more like the neuronal equivalent of committed relationships.

For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant … 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated...

[Sire,] je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.”En répondant Napoléon qui lui demanda pourquoi sa théorie de l’univers ne indique pas Dieux.

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult...

That’s Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they’re the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.