Famous Quotes & Sayings

Neil deGrasse Tyson

You can make a stack high enough to reach the moon and back, and only then will you have used your 100 billion hamburgers. This is terrifying news to cows.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

While the Copernican principle comes with no guarantees that it will forever guide us to cosmic truths, it's worked quite well so far: not only is Earth not in the center of the solar system, but the solar system is not in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy is not in the center of the universe, and it may come to pass that our universe is just one of many that comprise a multiverse. And in case you're one of those people who thinks that the edge may be a special place, we are not at the edge of anything either.

John Wilkins

'Tis certain that our senses are extremely disproportioned for comprehending the whole compass and latitude of things.

John von Neumann

Neumann, to a physicist seeking help with a difficult problem: Simple. This can be solved by using the method of characteristics. Physicist: I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics. Neumann: In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

John Steinbeck

The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.

John Searle

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard...Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill...At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

Tobias Smollett

A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.

Socrates

The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift.

Michael Shanks

In the meantime, I just have to create those realistic goals about the fact that I don't have a ton of options as an actor who's been on a science fiction show for 8 years.

Michael Shermer

But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.

Michael Shermer

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

Michael Shermer

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

Theodore Kaczynski

My occupation is an open question. I was once an assistant professor of mathematics. Since then, I have spent time living in the woods of Montana.

Thales

I will be sufficiently rewarded if when telling it to others you will not claim the discovery as your own, but will say it was mine.

Terry Pratchett

It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works.

Terry Pratchett

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Margaret Mead

most people prefer to carry out the kinds of experiments that allow the scientist to feel that he is in full control of the situation rather than surrendering himself to the situation, as one must in studying human beings as they actually live.

Margaret Mead

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

Michael Faraday

Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of "I" in one word is too much.

Michael Faraday

Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea than the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.

Michael Faraday

I propose to distinguish these bodies by calling those anions which go to the anode of the decomposing body; and those passing to the cathode, cations; and when I have occasion to speak of these together, I shall call them ions.

Michael Faraday

I ... express a wish that you may, in your generation, be fit to compare to a candle; that you may, like it, shine as lights to those about you; that, in all your actions, you may justify the beauty of the taper by making your deeds honourable and effectual in the discharge of your duty to your fellow-men.

Ray Bradbury

The human race likes to give itself airs. One good volcano can produce more greenhouse gases in a year than the human race has in its entire history.

Ray Bradbury

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

Meaning comes from the correspondence between the code and its execution, and the compact underlying structure of the world and its dynamics.

The self is the resultant of the interest of the genes.

Thought, then, is the execution of this computer code.

The mind is an evolved computer program.

James Black

I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.

James Anthony Froude

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; [but] a creed is always sensitive.

James Anthony Froude

The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.

Jacques Monod

Je cherche à comprendre.