Famous Quotes & Sayings

Neil deGrasse Tyson

People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The past is another planet.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Note, however, that you cannot simply add temperatures the way you can add volumes or weights. Two people in bed, each with body temperatures of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, do not normally create a 197.2 degree under-the-cover oven.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The telescope... is a conduit to the cosmos.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

There are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years, and I'm... snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector. And then I started feeling bad for the photon, and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said, no, those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Photons are accurately and legitimately described as waves and particles at the same time. They are genuine wavicles.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

UV is bad for molecules because its high energy breaks the bonds between a molecule's constituent atoms. That's why UV is bad for you, too: it's always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

A common way to compute density is, of course, to take the ratio of an object's mass to its volume. But other types of densities exist, such as the resistance of somebody's brain to the imparting of common sense....

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Deep in the world of atomic nuclei, life is not always tranquil.

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.

Niels Bohr

Prediction is difficult, especially the future.

Niels Bohr

An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.

Niels Bohr

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

Niels Bohr

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

Nassau William Senior

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.

Nassau William Senior

The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognised, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.

Morris Kline

There is no rigorous definition of rigor.

Morris Kline

The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.

John Ruskin

I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is coloured by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that a leaf is coloured green by a thing which is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.

John Ruskin

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

John Ruskin

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

John Ruskin

Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor.

John Polkinghorne

The test of a theory is its ability to cope with all the relevant phenomena, not its a priori 'reasonableness'. The latter would have proved a poor guide in the development of science, which often makes progress by its encounter with the totally unexpected and initially extremely puzzling.