Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ivar Giaever

Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.

Ivar Giaever

'Incontrovertible' is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.

I was always into science fiction as a kid. I loved science and tinkering with things.

William Gibson

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

Carl Sagan

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Carl Sagan

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.

Carl Sagan

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

Carl Sagan

I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.

Carl Sagan

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have.

Carl Sagan

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

Carl Sagan

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science

Carl Sagan

The claim is also sometimes made that science is as arbitrary or irrational as all other claims to knowledge, or that reason itself is an illusion. As Ethan Allen said Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are labouring to dethrone. If they argue without reason, which they must do, in order to be consistent with themselves, they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.

Bill Bryson

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

Bill Bryson

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

Benoit Mandelbrot

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales.

Benoit Mandelbrot

I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid-a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry-Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity ... The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless," to investigate the morphology of the "amorphous."

Antoine Lavoisier

In every combustion there is disengagement of the matter of fire or of light. A body can burn only in pure air [oxygen]. There is no destruction or decomposition of pure air and the increase in weight of the body burnt is exactly equal to the weight of air destroyed or decomposed. The body burnt changes into an acid by addition of the substance that increases its weight. Pure air is a compound of the matter of fire or of light with a base. In combustion the burning body removes the base, which it attracts more strongly than does the matter of heat, which appears as flame, heat and light.

Antoine Lavoisier

Mathematicians come to the solution of a problem by the simple arrangement of the data, and reducing the reasoning to such simple operations, to judgments so brief, that they never lose sight of the evidence that serves as their guide.

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.

Olivia Wilde

I've always been a fan of science fiction.

Ray Comfort

Science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted.

Paul Verhoeven

Science fiction is about worlds you don't know and worlds you can create, like in 'Avatar'.

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

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.

William Shakespeare

The wind-shak'd surge, with high and monstrous main, Seems to cast water on the burning Bear, And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole.

Allen Covert

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

James Hansen

You have no time to do the science if you're talking to the media.

Hendrik Poinar

Typically, there's a drive in science to do something just to say you've done it.

Carrie Vaughn

I would ask, 'Have you read '1984'? Have you read 'Brave New World'? If so, I'm sorry, but you read science fiction.'