Science Quotations | Page 6

Whether or not evolution is compatible with faith, science and religion represent two extremely different worldviews, which, if they coexist at all, do so most uncomfortably.

You can't stop technology or science, and it is snowballing quicker than ever. Something's got to come to a head. How? Who knows? But it will.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

One of our brainchildren is a still viable Science and Society course.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion. The former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

If you think there are no new frontiers, watch a boy ring the front doorbell on his first date.

So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.

I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

If I want to speculate wildly about the future, I have my science fiction. Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is either crazy or lying.

Every technology, every science that tells us more about ourselves, is scary at the time.

Providing better computer science education in public schools to kids, and encouraging girls to participate, is the only way to rewrite stereotypes about tech and really break open the old-boys' club.

I found myself facing a Christian Science Reading Room. My God! It had been eight years. There had never been any renunciation of religion on my part, but like so many people, it was a gradual fading away.

The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great 'open frontiers.' These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth - where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe 'here be dragons.'

Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public. But any serious industrialist who's facing 'climate exposure' - as it's now called by money managers - cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion.

I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.

Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Maybe we could think of science as being like a nuclear chain reaction in which people and ideas bounce off each other, and if critical mass is reached, a new field is formed.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

I wanted to be a scientist. My undergraduate degree is in biology, and I really did think I might go off and be some kind of a lady Darwin someplace. It turned out that I'm really awful at science and that I have no gift for actually doing science myself. But I'm very interested in others who practice science and in the stories of science.

I think both running and science reflect certain character traits. I have endurance, patience, and ambition. I'm willing to work hard toward a goal, to push myself and overcome limits. Running and science both let me express these traits.

The tension between public and private science is powerful.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

Really, some of the best 'X-Files' stories come right out of science. And you just apply that 'what-if' idea. Oh, what if this were true? And that's why so many times the show is scarier because it was not necessarily improbable.

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.

The general public has long been divided into two parts those who think science can do anything, and those who are afraid it will.

Science, it is said, no doubt has ameliorated the material conditions of human life, but is powerless to solve those moral and philosophical questions that interest cultured people so deeply.

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

In thus pointing out certain respects in which philosophy resembles literature more than science, I do not mean, of course, to imply that it would be well for philosophy if it ceased to aim at scientific rigor.

Politicians often misuse science for political ends and to pursue their own agenda.

I had a science teacher in middle school who inspired me... simply because she acknowledged me and made me feel that what I had to offer was worthy.

Human resources are just tremendous in Egypt, but we need the science base; we need the correct science base.

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. ... The time has come to consider how we might bring about a separation, as complete as possible, between Science and Government in all countries. I call this the disestablishment of science, in the same sense in which the churches have been disestablished and have become independent of the state.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

I think that issues of gender have been discussed widely at Harvard. But I think I was chosen clearly on the merits, and I wish to operate as president on the merits. I think, on one level, we might say that I can affirm that women have the aptitude to do science or to do anything, including being president of Harvard.

Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein.

I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

I sort of feel that climate change will be solved by science. I just feel instinctively that we will find a way of saving ourselves. But I am less confident that we won't destroy ourselves in other ways.

I don't really know what the future of science is. Maybe we have come to the end of science; maybe science is a finite field. The inventions resulting from this finite field, however, are boundless.

Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science - that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

Back when the concept of organ transplants qualified as science fiction, novelist Maurice Renard wrote a thriller called 'Les Mains d'Orlac.' Call it a bastard offspring of 'Frankenstein;' its plot revolved around the old theme of Science Giving Us Stuff We Shouldn't Have - in this particular case, restoring severed body parts.

The ability of the humans to not only function in space but be very functional when they arrive at their destination, those are the kinds of things we're learning from the science. Fuel transfer technologies and all the things we can learn about the space environment are all valuable to us for pressing on out.

With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts.

Much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as 'common sense.'

Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.

One of the lessons I have learned in the different stages of my career is that science is not done alone. It is through talking with others and sharing that progress is made.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Technology has enabled government to have investigative and situational awareness on a scale and scope that were science fiction when the Stasi shut its doors.

To far too many, science is a four-letter word, and under the modern media's false equivalency standards, a handful of skeptics are viewed as counterweights to the vast majority of scientists who acknowledge mankind's proven role in global warming.

I really didn't like the academic structure of science, but I realized I loved science and missed science.

Modern science is predicated on 'truths' verified through accurate observation and measurements of physical world phenomena.

We need to manage holistically, embracing all of our science and traditional knowledge - all sources of knowledge. We can do that from the household to government to international relations.

Most great advances have been a collaboration. That is the joy of science for me.

Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.

Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?

I can say, 'Well, I'm a male. I'm a male human. I'm a medical doctor. I'm an author...' If I go to a religious point of view, I will say, 'I am a soul. I am a spirit.' If I go into science, I will say, 'I am energy. I am light.' But the truth is I have no idea what I am.

About Grade 9 and Grade 10, I had a fantastic drama teacher, and it was one of the first subjects I actually felt that I was good at. I wasn't a mathematician. Didn't like science, any of those subjects. English and Drama were the two subjects that I loved and felt that I was good at.

Would people cheat on climate science? Sure. Because all it is a model into which there are 2,000 variables, and if I want this outcome, I nudge that one up a little and down a little bit, and there you go.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.

Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning.

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.

It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.

Nevertheless most of the evergreen forests of the north must always remain the home of wild animals and trappers, a backward region in which it is easy for a great fur company to maintain a practical monopoly.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?

Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina.

I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh.

At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a noble profession.

When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.

Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements.

I still meet old-school scientists who are like, 'Oh honey, women aren't good at science.' You kind of dismiss them as insane.

It turns out that understanding the British public is not rocket science. The British appreciate honesty and they also have a bonkers, off-the-wall sense of humour like me.

I think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate - it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop, as the game changer.

I think it is a mistake to judge science by Nobel Prizes.

This is magic we're talking about. It's supposed to go places science can't, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own.

Science fiction fans are awesome - they love you so much that they'll watch anything you do, even if it's complete crap. I never dreamed that I would go to conventions and sit down and have coffee with a Klingon. It's so weird, but it's my life.

If Christianity is not scientific, and Science is not of God, then there is no invariable law, and truth becomes an accident.

As a kid, I was obsessed with space. Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that, I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me.

Science is about applying what we know and asking what we don't know.

In essence, the science of agronomy is inseparable from biology.