Science Quotes - Page 4

Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. ... The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. ... This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities...

My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.

Science cannot stop while ethics catches up ... and nobody should expect scientists to do all the thinking for the country.

No Lord Almighty created the humans out of personal will. Creationism is simply a myth created by the weak and ignorant humans out of a psychological need to have a sense of eternal security.

Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live all their lives, in a mass; a beehive is a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively social, the members make their homes together, pool resources, travel in packs or schools, and share the food, but any single one can survive solitary, detached from the rest. Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship.

I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested. Physics was very easy.

A dream is a kind of nocturnal drama to which the only price of admission is falling asleep.

Hoh, Boy!" Freddy snorted, slapping his palm to his forehead. "I hope you never donate your brain to science. It would set civilization back fifty years.

It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'---however well attested---until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

Science is not a collection of facts. Nor is science something that happens in the laboratory. Science happens in the head. It's a flight of imagination beyond the constraints of ordinary perception. Columbus chapter -The Virgin and the Mousetrap

My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous massof post-human organic circuitry.Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.My love is a man-machine interface gun.

The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition. By ascertaining her diagnosis, she begins the process of mastery. No longer imprisoned in the wordlessness of the trauma, she discovers that there is a language for her experience. She discovers that she is not alone; others have suffered in similar ways. She discovers further that she is not crazy; the traumatic syndromes are normal human responses to extreme circumstances. And she discovers, finally, that she is not doomed to suffer this condition indefinitely; she can expect to recover, as others have recovered...

If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.

Then there is the cosmologist, who views himself as nothing but a manipulation of atoms; his mind configured out of randomness into the tool a vast, blind universe might use to perceive itself. If this is so then truly "all is vanity". What could be more pleasing to the cosmic narcissist than to gaze eternally with a billion eyes into the mirror that is himself? What fault, however, if certain eyes ultimately don’t like what they see?

THE Biggest enemy of Truth is known as Facts in our Society

Wherever there is abuse there is also corruption. Politics, philosophy, theology, science, industry, any field with the potential to affect the well-being of others can be destroyed by abuse and saved by good will.

I have graduated to the extent of not asking what is happening in my life because I trust the maker(God).

Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course. instead of truth and comprehension, we got deeply unsettling questions about what we can ever hope to know about the world.

Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful―God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses―except for hunger―they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.

Sometimes I'll pick up the "heart of the jungle" fossil on my bookshelf, or pull out my old field notebooks from my desk drawer, warped by Amazonian rains and the river's steam, the scent of the jungle still on their pages. I do this to remind myself that fiction does not have a monopoly on the unbelievable.

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz.[It had formerly been held that there were no genetic connections among species.]

Our big mistake in modern intellectualism is first and foremost its lack of nuance. We have made science synonymous with atheism - a presupposed conception and yet, another means to non sequiturs - and therefore, to a number of enthusiasts determined to go the further, anti-theism. Hereby let us observe that science has long served best and should be, if none other, the one discipline, if at all possible, free of potential ideology, pro-religious or anti-religious, and/or biased presupposition in order to maintain the true authenticity and the full reliability of its nature.

All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.

[They] pervert the course of nature [by saying] the sun does not move and that it is the earth that revolves and that it turns.[John Calvin illustrating his opposition to heliocentrism in a sermon due to the Bible's support of geocentrism]

Skeptical scientists often point out, as Carl Sagan has, that the wonders of real science far surpass the supposed wonders of fringe science. I think it is possible to invert that idea, and to say that the wonders of real consciousness far surpass what conventional science admits can exist.

Using information about animal behavior to justify social or political ideology is wrong . . . People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without having to worry about keeping up with the bonobos.

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

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any actual data for his assertions. They are nothing more than the mild musings of a wealthy British man, pondering the state of humanity’s soul between his sips of tea. Had Lewis actually famil- iarized himself with real human beings of the secular sort, per- haps sat and talked with them, he would have had to reconsider this notion. As so many apostates explained to me, morality is most certainly possible beyond the confines of faith. Can people be good without God? Can a moral orientation be sustained and developed outside of a religious context? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes.

While the art of printing is left to us science can never be retrograde what is once acquired of real knowledge can never be lost.

How do we change the way science is taught?Ask anybody how many teachers truly made a difference in their life, and you never come up with more than the fingers on one hand. You remember their names, you remember what they did, you remember how they moved in front of the classroom. You know why you remember them? Because they were passionate about the subject. You remember them because they lit a flame within you. They got you excited about a subject you didn't previously care about, because they were excited about it themselves. That's what turns people on to careers in science and engineering and mathematics. That's what we need to promote. Put that in every classroom, and it will change the world.

At the end of all spiritual paths, there lies only a cold graveyard; the path of science is the only path that may give you something better than this!

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Until now psychologists only factored in emotional and physical gratification while studying subjects, but believe me I'm coining a new term: VIRTUAL GRATIFICATION, which will become a new form of craving in near future. Watch On!

For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant ... 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated Pauli, .... For Pauli the explanation of the number 137 was the test of a successful field theory, a test which no theory has passed up to now.

Science is the poetry of reality.

His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive.

The true business of the philosopher, though not flattering to his vanity, is merely to ascertain, arrange and condense the facts.

Ponder now by thyself, how great fruit of wickedness the grain of evil seed had brought forth. And when the ears shall be cut down, which are without number, how great a floor shall they fill?

To learn that it's easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.

There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.

Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life.

The meaning of sex is illustrated by two eponymous heroes of British history, King Edward VII (who flourished in the years before the First World War) and the King Edward variety of potato which has fed the British working class for almost as long). The potato, unlike the royal family, reproduces asexually. Every King Edward potato is identical to every other and each on has the same set of genes as the hoary ancestor of all potatoes bearing that name. This is convenient for the farmer and the grocer, which is why sex is not encouraged among potatoes.

When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction

It is better to go near the truth and be imprisoned than to stay with the wrong and roam about freely, master Galilei. In fact, getting attached to falsity is terrible slavery, and real freedom is only next to the right.

If the human race wants to go to Hell in a basket technology can help it get there by jet.

Science is the desperate effort to catch up with the 13.8 billion year-old facts (give or take an eon or two).

In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.

Memories of the past are what drive us, whether to a life of beauty or a life of insanity is up to us.

Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.

Watching large mammals living their ordinary life in the jungle is extraordinary

Science was born, when religion failed to find the God!

The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis. The average man, indeed, is in a nation what the centre of gravity is in a body; it is by having that central point in view that we arrive at the apprehension of all the phenomena of equilibrium and motion.

I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, And the reason of things, And to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness: And I find more bitter than death, the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands-

Eva’s only fault has been the one of wanting to know more, to experiment and search with her own sources the laws of the Universe, of her own body and to refuse the teachings from “above”. Eva, basically, represents the curiosity of science against the passive acceptance that belongs to faith.

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined.