Famous Quotes & Sayings

Aristotle

A line is not made up of points. ... In the same way, time is not made up parts considered as indivisible 'nows.' Part of Aristotle's reply to Zeno's paradox concerning continuity.

Seth MacFarlane

Science has become politicized, and that's an embarrassment.

Stephen Jay Gould

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

John Milton

By night the Glass Of Galileo ... observes Imagin'd Land and Regions in the Moon.

Norbert Wiener

I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

A television advertisement must illustrate the scientific method to substantiate any claim.... That is why stains are lifted, ring-around-the-collar is removed, paper towels become soaked, excess stomach acid is absorbed, and headaches go away-all during the commercial.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

We fail in even the simplest of all scientific observations-nobody looks up anymore.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

And I don't care what else anyone has ever told you, the Sun is white, not yellow. Human color perception is a complicated business, but if the Sun were yellow, like a yellow lightbulb, then white stuff such as snow would reflect this light and appear yellow-a snow condition confirmed to happen only near fire hydrants.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

There is a theorem that colloquially translates, You cannot comb the hair on a bowling ball. ... Clearly, none of these mathematicians had Afros, because to comb an Afro is to pick it straight away from the scalp. If bowling balls had Afros, then yes, they could be combed without violation of mathematical theorems.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

He invited people to sign a petition that demanded either strict control of, or a total ban on, dihydrogen monoxide.... Yes, 86 percent of the passersby voted to ban water (H2O) from the environment. Maybe that's what really happened to all the water on Mars.

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

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.

Marie Curie

I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

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

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.

James Jeans

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

Niels Bohr

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

Louis Kronenberger

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Francis Bacon

It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.

Francis Bacon

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Isaac Newton

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

Bertrand Russell

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

Bertrand Russell

Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man

Bertrand Russell

The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

Allen Covert

I think if I did do something in another genre, it would be science fiction; I'm a big sci fi nerd.

Jack Horner

'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary.

George Herbert

'It's this accursed Science,' I cried. 'It's the very Devil. The mediaeval priests and persecutors were right, and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it-and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way.'

Jean de la Bruyere

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.

Ernst Mach

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Ernst Mach

Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

Ernst Mach

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.