Science quotes
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"We are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America-you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go."
"In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry."
"To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is."
"The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting."
"When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous."
"Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought."
"Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in."
"All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist."
"[On President Bush's plan to get to Mars in 10 years] Stupid. Robots would do a better job and be much cheaper because you don't have to bring them back."
"I want my books sold on airport bookstalls."
"History employs evolution to structure biological events in time."
"Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology."
"In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly."
"Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day."
"I just had a romance that I really care about, a lot-I mean, a lot-go up in smoke. Because of the stress, and the sort of other woman that Macintosh is."
"AB=1/4((A+B)^2-(A-B)^2) is an amazing identity, and unfortunately, I have to remind my current students how to prove it."
"I am not a scientist."
"Environmental extremists ... wouldn't let you build a house unless it looked like a bird's nest."
"Books are funny little portable pieces of thought."
"So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky."
