…on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night...

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws...

Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless...

Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid Deal with it.

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”(p.115)

Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.

Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, “materialism” would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a...

Cuando uno presta atención a las reacciones del público que visita un parque zoológico, advierte el despilfarro de una piedad sentimental, en la conmiseración que despiertan animales que se encuentran perfectamente, mientras que casi nadie...

The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict...

We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex…..we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their...

There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that...

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place....

Anybody who has been seriously engaged is scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.’ It is...

Black holes are the last vestige of civilizations obsessed with tinkering.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they...

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture… by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated...

He who does not cherish life, does not deserve to be among the living. ☥

… informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between...

The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced...

The expression e=mc2 is the ultimate statement in bounce per ounce.

Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable,...

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way,...

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed...

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person’s spirit from his body.

Where science is a dignified waltz in three-quarter time, magic is an improvised saxophone solo: all gut checks and synchronicities.

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of...

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into...

We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

The honeybee, Apis mellifera, is a species on the cusp of culture and nature … If we’re to seriously improve honeybee health and with it our own wellbeing, we need to make the most of...

Nobody knows what is life and still alive

Adam and Eve had first-hand empirical evidence of God’s existence. He walked in the Garden with them. Their problem was that God told them they could not eat of a certain tree. – p. 113

Ignorance is never ignored.

As Mollie said to Dailey in the 1890s: “I am told that there are five other Mollie Fanchers, who together, make the whole of the one Mollie Fancher, known to the world; who they are...

Everything can be summed up into an equation.

How much?” We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.

ORTHOGRAPHY, n. The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear. Advocated with more heat than light by the outmates of every asylum for the insane. They have had to concede a few...

In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe...

In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. […] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts...

The principal result of my investigation is that a uniform developmental principle controls the individual elementary units of all organisms, analogous to the finding that crystals are formed by the same laws in spite of...

Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding…

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

How strange it was, I thought, that when the tiny though thousandfold beauties of the Earth disappeared and the immeasurable beauty of outer space rose in the distant quiet splendor of light, man and the...

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school… It is my task to convince you not to turn away...