Science Quotes

“James Heron dreamed he was once more in the abandoned tunnels on Mars. As he walked, the barren rocky landscape transformed into hills of tangled vegetation. Lightning played in tall cumulus clouds in a darkening sky, and the sky was definitely an Earth sky, not a Martian one. He seemed to have companions, but their clothing was strange—very old fashioned, in fact, as if they belonged in the nineteenth century.
He didn’t recognise the landscape, but it seemed to be on Earth, and the group, several youths and a few older men, appeared to be suffering from the heat, plucking their shirts which displayed damp patches of perspiration. A short distance ahead of him walked a heavily built man who evidently was not enjoying the walk in the heat, his face flushed crimson and perspiring profusely.
The sky darkened and large drops of rain pelted the group, and they increased their pace. His view changed slightly as someone behind him called something he could not quite hear. The lightning seemed to be getting closer, and he and a companion—a youth, he noted ran for cover. He could smell the rain on the wet earth, and the fragrance of the vegetation intensified. He could feel the tension of the group—their fear perhaps?
Suddenly there was a blinding flash that seemed to engulf him—and then he jolted awake bathed in perspiration.”
― Patrick G Cox, First into the Fray

“I’ll talk to him any way I want to. Sure, you could try roughing me up, but you might want to stop and think about that, because you won’t always be in that uniform, and you won’t always have your buddies around, and this island—well, it’s an island. If you don’t know it as well as we do, and you don’t know the places to avoid, such as the beaches the pleurodons like, let’s just say a man with enemies could find life a little tricky here.” He stared the man down.
“Are you threatening me, Grover?”
“Not a threat. Just a warning. This planet is a wild, untamed place. It can be harsh and cruel when you least expect it.”
― Patrick G Cox, First into the Fray

“We’re not alone because we’re not separate from the swirl of a galaxy’s arms or the way wind catches dust in a gyre. We’re no more an anomaly than an atom is.”
― Jaime Green, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos

“Sometimes what makes things toxic is exactly what allows them to be used for good.”
― Neil Bradbury, A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them

“Most notably, perhaps, children with Down syndrome have an extraordinary sweetness of temperament, as if in inheriting an extra chromosome they had acquired a concomitant loss of cruelty and malice (if there is any doubt that genotypes can influence temperament or personality, then a single encounter with a Down child can lay that idea to rest).”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“[Evolution] is reminiscent of the way that the temperatures of a hot object and a cold object placed in contact with each another approach thermal equilibrium, in conformity with the second law of thermodynamics.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“Biological evolution is part of the winding-down process by which the informational gap between the potential and the actual tends to be reduced.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“Even among schemata, competition leavened with cooperation is sometimes both possible and advantageous. In the realm of theories, for instance, competing notions are not always mutually exclusive; sometimes a synthesis of several ideas comes much closer to the thruth than any of them does individually.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“Once a species of insect or bird has reached a new island and established a population, evolution toward gigantism does offer certain advantages: fat storage, thermal stability, and defense against predators, if there are any. But gigantism is also a way of becoming flightless, and flightlessness is a way of becoming marooned.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“I have in my hand the end of the thread which connects me to my ancestral mother way at the back. I pull on the thread and one woman's face in every generation feeling the tug, looks up at me.”
― Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry

“To a statistician, these numbers cannot be used to confirm anything, and so are valueless, because they are chance dispersions. But on psychological grounds I have discarded the idea that we are dealing with mere chance numbers. In a total picture of natural events, it is just as important to consider the exceptions to the rule as the averages. This is the fallacy of the statistical picture: it is one sided, inasmuch as is represents only the average aspect of reality and excludes the total picture. The statistical view of the world is a mere abstraction and their food incomplete and even fallacious, particularly so when it deals with man's psychology.”
― Carl G. Jung

“We no longer -bless- fields to reap abundant crops because scientifically-informed farming methods are more reliable for achieving that end. Thus, the claim of ritual inefficacy is based on the laws of physics, not Western prejudice.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“During the period of recollapse, the universe will not be running through its expansion in reverse. The notion that expansion and contraction would be symmetrical with each other is what Stephen Hawking calss his "greatest mistake”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“Entropy can be regarded as a measure of ignorance”
― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

“AndGate = Sacred Facet Ring = 1;
NotGate = Rainbow Globe Whorl Turn;
OrGate = NotGate × AndGate;
Xor1 = Item Time = 11;
Xor2 = Diadem Circlet = 11;
Matrix = Xor1 × Xor2 × OrGate;”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2

“My Chosen Aspect for today after abstraction :
Van Facet Diadem = 511 61357 4924513
6
10, 2
7
Result = 9, 11”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2

“The unique epistemic role of the university in our culture was to set up conditions where students could learn how to bring arguments and evidence to a question, and to teach them not to project convictions derived from tribal loyalties onto the evaluation of evidence on testable questions. The rise of identity politics should have been recognized by university faculties as a threat to their ability to teach decoupled argumentation and evidence evaluation. As a monistic ideology (Tetlock 1986), where all values come from a single perspective, identity politics entangles many testable propositions with identity-based convictions. It fosters myside bias by reversing Kahan’s (2016) prescription—by transforming positions on policy-relevant facts into badges of group-based convictions. One of the most depressing social trends of the last few decades has been universities becoming proponents of identity politics—a doctrine that attacks the heart of their intellectual mission.”
― Keith E. Stanovich, The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking

“Everything is mental health.”
― Jordan G Kobos

“I wish I had this screen in my living room," Harry said. "I'd have had the most popular Super Bowl parties on the block.”
― John Scalzi, Old Man's War

“We Are Turkiye (The Sonnet)

Earthquake may shatter our houses,
But it can never shatter our hearts.
We shall rise from the rubble once again,
We shall build back against nature's curse.

But this time let us build back better,
By putting our faith in science not politics.
We could've averted such cataclysmic terror,
Had we heeded the warnings of scientists.

A scientist works to preserve life,
Politician plays publicity with death.
Given the choice between the two,
Listen to the scientist without wait.

Why do people have to die
for us to open our eyes!
If we still fail to heed reason,
nothing will stop the funeral cries.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“Why do people have to die for us to open our eyes! If we still fail to heed reason, nothing will stop the funeral cries.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“A scientist works to preserve life, Politician plays publicity with death.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“The scientist who asserts that cell division is a misnomer, that cell membranes are mere veils, and that all differentiation serves but the purpose of love, may face an arduous battle. Nevertheless, it is a noble and worthy battle, a battle of wisdom over ignorance.”
― Wald Wassermann

“Modern cultures restrict personhood to human beings, a selfish and dangerous contraction of awareness and sympathy. Primal cultures distribute personhood throughout nature. In such societies, animals and plants, even mountains and rivers, are spoken of as being people-beings with status equal to the status of human beings. Everything in nature has sentiment and purpose.”
― Christopher Camuto , Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

“Nature encourages us to think and feel in primal ways, to clear our heads and hearts of noise, to observe the found world closely, partly to see it for what it is and partly to absorb it as a threshold for imaginative understanding of the nature of nature and our place therein.”
― Christopher Camuto, Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

“The reality is that when you die, assuming no supernatural afterlife, things will not be, from your perspective, as they were before you were born. Instead, you will be timelessly, though imperceptibly so, and eternally, though deceptively so, paused in the last conscious moment of your final experience.”
― Bryon Ehlmann, A Natural Afterlife Discovered: The Newfound, Psychological Reality That Awaits Us at Death

“Science has become the new religion.”
― Sayem Sarkar

“What is the ‘present’? We say that only the things of the present exist: the past no longer exists and the future doesn’t exist yet. But in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the ‘now’.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“It’s just us,” said Simone. “Either we stop this thing, or everybody dies.”
― Tom Durwood, The Adventures of Ruby Pi and the Geometry Girls

“As time crawled on, Daniel became mesmerized. He gazed at the planes of Rupa’s face, the texture of her skin, the forelock of hair that fell over one of her eyes.”
― Tom Durwood, The Adventures of Ruby Pi and the Math Girls