Science Quotations | Page 9

The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets, some of which hew to the realistic parameters and paradigms embraced by science, others of which partake more of fantasy and magic.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.

I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.

We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science.

I've actually started a number of businesses in my career. So I'm 28 currently, but when I was about 16, I started building Websites, and that's how I put myself through school. I went to Duke with a degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, and then to Princeton.

Kids are different from adults. They are not as developed as far as brain science, controlling impulses, and maturity, and fall prey to all kinds of pressures.

Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.

There is a major problem with reliance on placebos, like most vitamins and antioxidants. Everyone gets upset about Big Science, Big Pharma, but they love Big Placebo.

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all.

I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.

I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.

Many a fine SF story uses science or technology merely as backdrop. Many a fine SF story presumes a technological breakthrough and explores its implications without attempting to predict how the thing might actual work.

Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.

You can only go into science because you're interested in it.

My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.

I'm not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science - and then learn to write.

I read science, because to me, that's extremely exciting. It's like a great detective story, and it's happening right in front of us.

You see, I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it.

In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.

Growing up in the '70s and '80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.

My research career has been devoted to understanding human decision-making and problem-solving processes. The pursuit of this goal has led me into the fields of political science, economics, cognitive psychology, computer science and philosophy of science, among others.

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

I was on the football team because I wanted to experience the different iconic social classes of high school. So football for me was an attempt to socially integrate in an interesting way. And then I didn't like it anymore and stopped doing it and focused more on drama and science and other forms of art and music.

'Star Wars' is a grand soap opera, and 'Star Trek' is about technology, they tried to explain the reality of it, as far-fetched as it might be. And that's why I've always liked the science behind the fiction.

Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.

I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science.

If you keep telling girls they're less good at science, that will probably be self-fulfilling. But there are quite a lot of women who are good at it.

So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.

I'm only interested in science fiction that's used as a literary device, a shortcut into something more exploratory or universal about our experience. That's why I think it was invented and why mythology was invented; it's a tool, not an end to itself.

Modern science tells us that the conscious self arises from a purely physical brain. We do not have immaterial souls.

Science is simply a powerful way of understanding what's real and what isn't, what's true and what's not. It can help us determine what works, what doesn't, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.

Despite the best efforts of apologists like William Lane Craig, the 'evidence' for Christianity's truth is, in truth, not the kind that science will or should ever admit. We believers mean something different by the word: something that puts faith permanently in the category of irreproducible results.

The density of settlement of economists over the whole empire of economic science is very uneven, with a few areas of modest size holding the bulk of the population.

One of the things that all religions have is a narrative of doomsday. There has to be some kind of overarching fear of the future. If there wasn't, none of the religions could invoke this important thing - that science has no evidence of, by the way - called free will.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.

I was sent to a finishing school, which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

Pauley Perrette: I was a criminal science fanatic and went to study it in college as well and I think that helped me on NCIS because I was comfortable with the language, I had studied criminal science in school for years.

Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

For years I've wanted to write a book about mummies, and had been following the science of mummy CT scans when the premise for 'The Keepsake' occurred to me: what if an 'ancient' mummy turns out to have a bullet in its leg? How does a modern murder victim get turned into a mummy?

My inbox is now bulging with touching emails from young women scientists who have been kind enough to write and thank me for inspiring them and helping them on their way. It has also been of great comfort to me to see many women at the top of science testifying for my record in supporting women scientists.

I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.

We don't devote enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

The world cries out for global rules that respect the achievements of science.

There is an anti-science by the far right. We have to be careful that the far left doesn't balance this with a naive approach of promising what we can't deliver. I mean, science is neutral; it's not politically conservative or liberal.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

I'm talking about science on the leading edge, where it's not clear which way things are going be cause we don't know, and I'm dealing with areas which we don't know about.

I dig science fiction, though it was never really my thing.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

The only time you mustn't fail is the last time you try.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant

Engineering or technology is all about using the power of science to make life better for people, to reduce cost, to improve comfort, to improve productivity, etc.

We have to start encouraging women to get into math and science early on in life... But to just say TechCrunch is perpetuating the problem because there aren't enough women speakers at our events is just a way to get attention and not solve the problem. So do we want to solve the problem, or do we want to just pick on me?

There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious.

When Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University, got divorced two years ago, she noticed that a cluster of her friends were splitting up at around the same time.

I absolutely hated 'Gattaca.' I left the theater shaking my head because the science in the film was just terrible. No genetic test will ever tell you how many heartbeats you have left. No genetic test will ever be more accurate in telling an employer how well you'll do at a job than your performance at a past job would be.

Art and science have their meeting point in method.

The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes.

What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.

Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

It is my belief that no matter how advanced man may become in science, technology, systems, and knowledge, he can never improve on the foundational precepts of marriage as the bedrock of social development.

We must not confuse religion with God, or technology with science. Religion stands in relationship to God as technology does in relation to science. Both the conduct of religion and the pursuit of technology are capable of leading mankind into evil; but both can prompt great good.

The scientific community should work as hard as possible to address major issues that affect our everyday lives such as climate change, infectious diseases and counterterrorism; in particular, 'clean energy' research deserves far higher priority. And science and technology are the prime routes to tackling these issues.

I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

Being able to have a laboratory on Mars, being able to have some sort of sustained human presence on Mars in the future, I think, is critically important for science.

Most people have a concentration in particular areas; it might be politics, it might be science, it might be business, it might be sports. I care about all of those, and that's why I've chosen the formats I chose.

When you're doing Sebring in the back straight at 185 or 187, and the car's moving, you gotta know what to do with it, how to read it. Just the science of understanding shocks - forget spring rates - is mind-boggling.

Modern science says: 'The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.' From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

The box jellyfish takes you into an area of what I'd call science fiction. You feel like you've been dipped in hot burning oil. You burst into flames.