Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Darwin

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

Charles Darwin

...all nature is perverse & will not do as I wish it.

Charles Babbage

That science has long been neglected and declining in England, is not an opinion originating with me, but is shared by many, and has been expressed by higher authority than mine.

Charles Babbage

The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.

Charles Babbage

What is there in a name? It is merely an empty basket, until you put something into it.

Charles Babbage

The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery ... As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.

Blaise Pascal

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.

Blaise Pascal

Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies.

Blaise Pascal

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Edward R. Murrow

A satellite has no conscience.

Brian Greene

We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.

Brian Greene

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

Brian Greene

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

Archilochus

Nothing can be sworn impossible since Zeus made night during mid-day, hiding the light of the shining Sun.

Barbara Kingsolver

Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.

Baruch Spinoza

Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.

Ashley Montagu

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

Ashley Montagu

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

Arthur Cayley

Metrical geometry is thus a part of descriptive geometry, and descriptive geometry is all geometry.

Brian Aldiss

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

Jane Goodall

Some humans are mathematicians-others aren't.

Jane Goodall

Louis [Leakey] was anxious to initiate a scientific study of these chimpanzees. It would be difficult, he emphasized, for nothing was known; there were no guidelines for such a field study; and the habitat was remote and rugged. Dangerous wild animals would be living there, and chimpanzees themselves were considered at least four times stronger than humans. I remember wondering what kind of scientist he would find for such a herculean task.

James Whistler

If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general.

Charles Fort

The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts amd amusements.

Charles Fort

Science of to-day-the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow-the superstition of to-day.

Benjamin Franklin

And we daily in our experiments electrise bodies plus or minus, as we think proper. [These terms we may use till your Philosophers give us better.] To electrise plus or minus, no more needs to be known than this, that the parts of the Tube or Sphere, that are rubb'd, do, in the Instant of Friction, attract the Electrical Fire, and therefore take it from the Thin rubbing; the same parts immediately, as the Friction upon them ceases, are disposed to give the fire they have received, to any Body that has less.

Benjamin Franklin

I say it is impossible that so sensible a people [citizens of Paris], under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing.

Avicenna

Pure earth does not petrify, because the predominance of dryness over [i.e. in] the earth endows it not with coherence but rather with crumbliness. In general, stone is formed in two ways only (a) through the hardening of clay, and (b) by the congelation [of waters].

Arthur Eddington

[When thinking about the new relativity and quantum theories] I have felt a homesickness for the paths of physical science where there are ore or less discernible handrails to keep us from the worst morasses of foolishness.

Arthur Eddington

The electron, as it leaves the atom, crystallises out of Schrödinger's mist like a genie emerging from his bottle.

Arthur Eddington

But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model-the Bohr model atom-because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.

Arthur Eddington

There is no space without aether, and no aether which does not occupy space.

Arthur Eddington

Electrical force is defined as something which causes motion of electrical charge; an electrical charge is something which exerts electric force.