Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Marie Curie

It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.

Marie Curie

In science we must be interested in things, not in persons.

Marie Curie

After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.

Marie Curie

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for mankind.

Marie Curie

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

Marie Curie

Nothing in this world is to be feared... only understood.

Theodore Sturgeon

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

Theodore Sturgeon

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.

Theodore Parker

Science, also, is most largely indebted to these beauty-loving Greeks, for truth is one form of loveliness.

Theodore Roosevelt

Nowadays the field naturalist-who is usually at all points superior to the mere closet naturalist-follows a profession as full of hazard and interest as that of the explorer or of the big-game hunter in the remote wilderness.

Theodore Kaczynski

My occupation is an open question. I was once an assistant professor of mathematics. Since then, I have spent time living in the woods of Montana.

Thales

I will be sufficiently rewarded if when telling it to others you will not claim the discovery as your own, but will say it was mine.

Terry Pratchett

It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works.

Terry Pratchett

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.