Science Quotes - Page 11

We are the result of the universe attempting to understand itself

Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy.Heat, like gravity, penetrates every substance of the universe, its rays occupy all parts of space. The object of our work is to set forth the mathematical laws which this element obeys. The theory of heat will hereafter form one of the most important branches of general physics.

If God gives you a gift and you don't know what to do with it, it won't make you happy. Some of you God gave a wonderful husband but you can't make a home and some of you God gave a wonderful wife but you can't make a good husband. Some of you can't even unwrap the gift so that you can appreciate it.

And yet their reward appear not, and their labor had no fruit: for I have gone here and there through the heathen, and I see that they flow in wealth, and think not upon thy commandments.

……but work in the field has nothing to do with dignity or with anything except patience, concentration, and eternal vigilance

Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.

Life on earth is considered a miracle, but why is other life in the cosmos a difficult concept?

These be they that have put off the mortal clothing, and put on the immortal, and have confessed the name of God: now are they crowned, and receive palms.

Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced

...I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described...It's just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it seems as though Ham and his followers just can't handle the truth. They throw aside their common sense and cling to the hope that there's something that makes it okay to *not* think for themselves.""The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos...If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it. The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos...If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it.

The best defence against the atom bomb is not to be there when it goes off.

She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.

Chaos is not the lack of order, it is merely the absence of order, that the observer is used to.

To create something new, knowledge is essentially required, but not academic degree.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

It tastes like water spiked with strange.

Nature is a better scientist than any human can ever be.

If Enlightenment in a technical sense is the programmatic word for progress in the awareness of explicitness, one can say without fear of grand formulas that rendering the implicit explicit is the cognitive form of fate. Were this not the case, one would never have had cause to believe that later knowledge would necessarily be better knowledge - for, as we know, everything that has been termed 'research' in the last centuries has rested on this assumption. Only when the inward-folded 'things' or facts are by their nature subject to a tendency to unfold themselves and become more comprehensible for us can one - provided the unfolding succeeds - speak of a true increase in knowledge. Only if the 'matters' are spontaneously prepared (or can be forced by imposed examination) to come to light in magnified and better-illuminated areas can one seriously - which here means with ontological emphasis - state that there is science in progress, there are real knowledge gains, there are expeditions in which we, the epistemically committed collective, advance to hidden continents of knowledge by making thematic what was previously unthematic, bringing to light what is yet unknown, and transforming vague cognizance into definite knowledge. In this manner we increase the cognitive capital of our society - the latter word without quotation marks in this case.

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 in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth

All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.

By letting the IoT devices into our everyday life, it is not like we entered the zoo, but we released the animals into our world.

Cecile was teaching in Berkeley and I was [at Livermore]. He probably had, could have had, some influence on Teller, [for] Teller was quite generous in allowing me one whole semester off to be at Berkeley to work on something and also a semester off at the Institute for Advanced Study. Then I won the Gravity Research Foundation first prize.

And, if you'll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you'll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just a matter of tidying up around the fringes of the big ideas.

…the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.

In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith.

Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere.

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

I do not have any trust fund, I have always trusted God for all my funds.

It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists," they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution.

The conflict hasn't gotten worst but the contest has really changed.............

The Metaphoton is a web of energy fields or complexes - having three hierarchical complexes called the light complex, mind complex and spirit complex.

As thou know not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou know not the works of what makes all.

Light is the ultimate messenger of the universe.

A nation that can't control its energy sources can't control its future.

No one wants to stumble into gates on moonless nights to trip in holes dug by dogs, but Maria finds more beauty than danger in night.

I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won't get us very far.

The language of mathematics, scientific observations, and our perceptivity together knit the window to reality.

All the failures in my life freed me from all my fears so that I can succeed.

In our adventures, we have only seen our monsters more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways - ways that reveal a cancer cell to be. like Grendel, a distorted version of ourselves." -1989 Nobel Prize Speech, Cited in Siddhartha Mukherjee's Emperor of All Maladies

The greatest gift you can leave to humanity is the beautiful trace you left behind yourself that invites people to reason, science and peace!

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide.

You know what's wrong with scientific power?... It's a form of inherited wealth... Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual Guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline. Now, what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to his with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won't use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of the getting the power changes you so that you won't abuse it. But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step... There is no discipline... no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature... A karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is the kind of power that science fosters, and permits.

Normative statements about "women's roles" and girls' and women's behaviour being "appropriately feminine" were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as "naked facts" of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour.

Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability.

But we must not forget that all things in the world are connected with one another and depend on one another, and that we ourselves and all our thoughts are also a part of nature. It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of the change of things; made because we are not restricted to any one definite measure, all being interconnected. A motion is termed uniform in which equal increments of space described correspond to equal increments of space described by some motion with which we form a comparison, as the rotation of the earth. A motion may, with respect to another motion, be uniform. But the question whether a motion is in itself uniform, is senseless. With just as little justice, also, may we speak of an “absolute time” --- of a time independent of change. This absolute time can be measured by comparison with no motion; it has therefore neither a practical nor a scientific value; and no one is justified in saying that he knows aught about it. It is an idle metaphysical conception.

I was fascinated by information about the Earth's magnetic field in my geological studies, and started wondering what would happen if long-overdue changes in geomagnetism manifested in modern times. I decided, working with my wife Tiane, to take these ideas further by adding a dash of adventure and dramatic twists and turns exploring how different types of people, good and bad, might react.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

The trouble with science geeks, as you call them, is that hey put discovery before anything else. It was a science geek who discovered the atom bomb. He didn't intend to cause mass murder, but he did nonetheless.

To respect a mystery is to make way for the answer.

For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.

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 a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

The mystical non-sense of afterlife indeed gives solace to the mind in times of weakness, but why should the mind let its weakness be the fuel for primitiveness in the first place!

Conventional wisdom nor scientific, mathematical prove of randomness in life could do nothing to deter human's curiosity for the unknown, however small the chance of a positive outcome maybe.

Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life—yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammurabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

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, they tend to have a limited awarenessof the present and thus a limited ability to derive satisfaction from ordinary activities in everyday life. They concentrate on manipulating the external world and measure their living standard by the quantity of material possessions, while they become ever more alienated from their inner world and unable to appreciate the process of life. For people whose existence is dominated by this mode of experience no level of wealth, power, or fame will bring genuine satisfaction

A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.