It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus’s heliocentric...

Through the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of another fragment of mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol is no more the effect of a ‘vital principle’ than the splitting up...

If Scientists Like Einstein didn’t exist, we wouldn’t never know about the Universe

What’s needed now are software technologies that interconnect computing systems, people and data to produce more rapid answers to the questions of science, and to help researchers use computation in the most effective manner,

They have to say SOMETHING. Maria Bartiromo can’t exactly look into the camera and say that the Dow is down half a percent today because of random Brownian motion.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their...

we roar along the rust belts——the great red spot——the polar vortex——the caress of solar flares——ruffle the molten methane and ammonia oceans of me——the storm-riven non-surface of me and mine——that which you call skin——a threadbare term...

Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are...

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and...

But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows...

There is much that science doesn’t understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case...

Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored...

Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm,...

Wissenschaft ist Macht.

It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the...

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

Timmy has no intention of going on the trip. He has never been on a sightseeing tour before and according to him, he is never going on one, end of discussion. Who wants to see...

(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts,...

You spend months barely acknowledging someone’s existence and then BOOM, you’re emotionally addicted to her. Science would probably blame it on chemicals, genetics or something equally logical, but it didn’t feel like anything logical

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conflation. And then do as...

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

He claimed to be an atheist, but he always used religious symbolism…

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of...

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

This is hard stuff. There’s a lot of new science involved.

Whatever thing a man gets quickly enraged about is his idol, and whatever thing he makes his idol becomes his religion.

The astronomer is, in some measure, independent of his fellow astronomer; he can wait in his observatory till the star he wishes to observe comes to his meridian; but the meteorologist has his observations bounded...

Very few, even among those who have taken the keenest interest in the progress of the revolution in natural knowledge set afoot by the publication of the ‘Origin of Species’; and who have watched, not...

I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.

I believe the visionaries and true reflections of society will be rewarded after their lives. Those being rewarded now are giving the public what it needs now, usually applauding its current state and clearing consciences.

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his...

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes...

Science is not a collection of facts. Nor is science something that happens in the laboratory. Science happens in the head. It’s a flight of imagination beyond the constraints of ordinary perception. Columbus chapter -The...

pg.90 of Philosophy in the Flesh: We are basing our argument on the existence of at least three stable scientific findings–the embodied mind, the cognitive unconscious, and metaphorical thought. Just as the ideas of cells...

If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find...

El cielo es una injuria perpetua e insoportable. Las estrellas no me conocen y yo no podré nunca hacer nada de ellas ni contra ellas. Cuando he sabido a cuántos millares de años de luz...

A person functioning exclusively in the Cartesian mode may be free from manifest symptoms but cannot be considered mentally healthy. Such individuals typically lead ego-centred, competitive, goal-oriented lives. Overpreoccupied with their past and their future,...

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools,...

[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods]Oh, no. Absolutely not… The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don’t have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to...

Çoğumuz sevilmeyi ummuşuzdur yalnızca giydirilip beslenmeyi değil, anlaşılmayı, dikkate alınmayı, saygı gösterilmeyi beklemişizdir. Çoğumuz inanabilmeyi ummuşuzdur. Küçükken, o insan buluşu olan yalanı henüz bilmiyorduk yalnızca sözlerle söylenen yalanı değil, sesle, mimiklerle, gözlerle, yüzsel anlatımla yalan...

The text-book is rare that stimulates its reader to ask, Why is this so? Or, How does this connect with what has been read elsewhere?