Doctor Seward: But, Professor Van Helsing, modern medical science does not admit of such a creature! The vampire is a pure myth, superstition. Van Helsing: I may be able to bring you proof that the superstition of yesterday can become the scientific ...
I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is s...
In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race...
We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it's the brain wiring that I'm more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the less...
I am as non-accepting of medical quackery and unscientific approaches as anybody else. I've grown up as a card-carrying scientist, and I know the power of science to answer questions, and for many questions I don't know of anything better than scient...
Anyone who has experienced a strange episode in their life that defies all present scientific knowledge can appreciate the limits of human knowledge. There's nothing like such an event to make you keenly aware of how little we truly know and understa...
Despite my resistance to hyperbole, the LHC belongs to a world that can only be described with superlatives. It is not merely large: the LHC is the biggest machine ever built. It is not merely cold: the 1.9 kelvin (1.9 degrees Celsius above absolute ...
The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness o...
The industrial and technological revolutions have made our lives simpler, in terms of what is physically required of us on a daily basis, but they have also made it possible for us to do a whole lot less than we ought to be doing, and we suffer for i...
It's amazing the stupid things I say sometimes. I mean, you could start an entire branch of scientific research about the stuff I say that gets proved wrong while I'm still busy saying it.
Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions.
The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.
[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and...
That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.
Teaching the layperson (divulgare) is not distorting (tergiversare) the subject, but educating the public; and it is our duty as scientists to educate without distorting the essence of the scientific knowledge attained by humanity. The future of our ...
It is therefore scientifically correct to say that 'natural selection has been proved to be an agent of evolutionary change' - we can, in fact, prove it by doing. But it is totally illegitimate to claim that the discovery of this mechanism - natural ...
Someone may have all the technical knowledge, scientific intellect and business know-how but when he/she decides to choose laziness, excuses, procrastination, complaining and other bad attitudes, his/her relevance is meaningless.
That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.
The serious scientific public trusted him implicitly and consequently had no need to read him. If those people were to start getting critical, no further progress would be possible. They would spend a whole year over every page.
I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scient...
Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her - the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make object...
