Science Quotes - Page 24

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  The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

  Isaac Asimov

  Life, Wise, Wisdom

  "Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Questions". Book edited with Jason A. Shulman, p. 281, 1988.

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• To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music.

  John R. Pierce

  Real, Communication, Men

  John R. Pierce (2012). “An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.

  George Johnson

  Hands, Boxing, Trying

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• Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods-in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

  Albert Einstein

  Fate, Blessing, Men

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• Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis]

  George Wald

  Life, Running, Stars

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• There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Philosopher, Absurd, Statements

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• I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don't know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.

  Stephen Hawking

  Knowledge, Thinking, Law

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• A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.

  Tobias Smollett

  Eels, Hunters, Tails

  Tobias George Smollett, Tobias Smollett (1831). “The adventures of Peregrine Pickle: In which are included, Memoirs of a lady of quality. In four volumes. ...”, p.246

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• We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Expression, Advice, Opinion

  "Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. at 630". Dissenting opinion, November 10, 1919.

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• If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

  Albert Einstein

  Knowledge, Should Have, Nuclear

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• In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

  Immanuel Kant

  Mathematics, Department, Physical Science

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• I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.

  S. J. Perelman

  Funny, Beautiful, Girl

  1944 Crazy Like a Fox,'Captain Future, BlockThat Kick'.

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• The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

  Carl Sagan

  Atheist, Fall, Mean

  "Scientists & Their Gods". U.S. News & World Report, Vol. 111, 1991.

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• If the Earth is the size of a pea in New York, then the Sun is a beachball 50m away, Pluto is 4km away, and the next nearest star is in Tokyo. Now shrink Pluto's orbit into a coffee cup; then our Milky Way Galaxy fills North America.

  Wayne Hays

  New York, Stars, Coffee

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• Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

  Bertrand Russell

  Wisdom, Giving, Cynical

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Top Philosophy Collections”, p.66, 谷月社

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• I do not think that this [the universe] can be explained only by natural causes, and are forced to impute to the wisdom and ingenuity of an intelligent.

  Isaac Newton

  Intelligent, Thinking, Causes

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• I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

  James Bryant Conant

  Venture, Tests, Theory

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• The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

  William Shakespeare

  Strong, Eye, Names

  'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1595-6) act 5, sc. 1, l. 7

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• It turned out I was pretty good in science. But again, because of the small budget, in science class we couldn't afford to do experiments in order to prove theories. We just believed everything. Actually, I think that class was called Religion. Religion class was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were being taught in all the other classes.

  George Carlin

  Thinking, Order, Class

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

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• Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lying, Math, Artist

  Orthodoxy ch. 2 (1908)

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• Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

  Isaac Asimov

  Atheist, Religion, Atheism

  Free Inquiry Journal, Spring 1982.

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• For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Graduation, Future, Eye

  "Locksley Hall" l. 119 (1842)

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• God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Death, Knives, Atheism

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs”, p.181, Vintage

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• The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket.

  Albert Einstein

  Engineering, Experience, Tools

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• Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.

  William James

  Thinking, Hands, Feelings

  1907 Pragmatism.

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