A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

Those who are ignorant of Geology, find no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds which indicate...

Order is heaven’s first law.

Fascinating … The whole thing [the school dance] seems to work on a similar principle to a supercollider. You know, two streams of opposingly charged particles accelerated till they’re just under the speed of light,...

deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be....

We hold these truths to be self-evident.{Franklin’s edit to the assertion in Thomas Jefferson’s original wording, ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable’ in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it...

A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass...

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics…

Do experimental work but keep in mind that other investigators in the same field will consider your discoveries as less than one fourth as important as they seem to you.

It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the...

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone...

This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions; journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view.

I’m convinced that before the year 2000 is over, the first child will have been born on the moon.

You mean the day they stop needing the church,” Vittoria challenged, moving toward him. “Doubt is your last shred of control. It is doubt that brings souls to you. Our need to know that life...

Staring at the blue sky causes insomnia to occur in the human.

Nobody knows how the stand of our knowledge about the atom would be without him. Personally, Bohr is one of the amiable colleagues I have met. He utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and...

Billions of years ago God was creating universes and life; thousands of years ago he was creating angry floods, sin-saving human sacrifices and audible burning bushes. Today he occasionally appears on a piece of toast....

However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the...

Si l’organisme vivant est un system hiérarchisé dont le niveau d’organisation est au-dessus du niveau chimique, il est alors évident qu’il doit être étudié à tous les niveaux et qu’une recherche limitée à l’un d’entre...

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the...

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and...

…the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible...

… researchers argue that it’s of utmost importance to unravel the nature of black holes, lest we someday begin to worship them. Sounds ridiculous, but whole segments of humankind have often revered the unknowable, venerating...

Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don’t look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact,...

dear samanthai’m sorrywe have to get a divorcei know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain:it’s not youit sure as hell isn’t meit’s just human beings don’t...

Bradley says. ”That’s the way science works. These guys in Washington seem to think it’s some kind of conspiracy, that we start out with an agenda and then we conduct the science to prove that.

If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to...

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one environment to another.

We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire…

You don’t sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet.” Rey smiled. “Can I be both?” “But you’d rather be a poet.””Who wouldn’t?” he said.

The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology...

On the first day, man created God

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table – how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years...

There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it...

By the glare of false science betrayed, that leads to bewilder and dazzles to blind.

Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories,...

Clarke’s First Law – Corollary: When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion—the distinguished but elderly scientists...

Çünkü devrim, hiçbir zaman umutsuzluk temeli üzerine kurulmamıştır ve de kurulamaz.

Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.

Quick dinner with … Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who’s visiting with the children for a while. We talked about her work as a microbiologist and the behaviour of the epithingalingie under the influence...

Join those seeking the truth and be wary of those claiming to have found it.

Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.

Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by...

Quantum theory tells us, Mr. Thomas, that every point in the universe is intimately connected to every other point, regardless of apparent distance. In some mysterious way, any point on a planet in a distant...

The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his...

Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible,...

The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things...