Today In Science Quotes & Sayings

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth. — Cyril Connolly

Mathematical thinking is not the same as doing mathematics - at least not as mathematics is typically presented in our school system. School math typically focuses on learning procedures to solve highly stereotyped problems. Professional mathematicians think a certain way to solve real problems, problems that can arise from the everyday world, or from science, or from within mathematics itself. The key to success in school math is to learn to think inside-the-box. In contrast, a key feature of mathematical thinking is thinking outside-the-box - a valuable ability in today's world. — Keith Devlin

He rises a copy of a poster. On the left is a quote from The New York Times dated October 9, 1903. It says,'The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians in from one million to ten million years'. On the right is a quote from Orville Wright's diary, dated October 9, 1903. 'We started assembly today' it says. — Joel Garreau

Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes - which means we're never caught up with our lives. — Pico Iyer

Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance. — Thomas E. Mann

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups ... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. — Philip K. Dick

In 1650 Bishop Ussher dated the creation from the genealogy given in the Bible at 4004 B.C.; for a long time (even for some people today) this was accepted as "gospel truth." However, if you accept a miracle such as this, what's wrong with creation 5 minutes ago? It would be scarcely more difficult for the Creator to create all of us sitting here, with our memories of events that never really happened, with our worn shoes that were never really new, with spots of soup that were never really spilled on our ties, and so on. Such a beginning is logically possible, but extremely hard to believe! — Leigh Page

Our ancestors had displayed great strengths in space science. What people like Aryabhata had said centuries ago are being recognised by science today. We are a country which had these capabilities. We need to regain them. — Narendra Modi

It is interesting that this thoroughness, which is a virtue, is often misunderstood. When someone says a thing has been done scientifically, often all he means is that it has been done thoroughly. I have heard people talk of the "scientific" extermination of the Jews in Germany. There was nothing scientific about it. It was only thorough. There was no question of making observations and then checking them in order to determine something. In that sense, there were "scientific" exterminations of people in Roman times and in other periods when science was not so far developed as it is today and not much attention was paid to observation. In such cases, people should say "thorough" or "thoroughgoing," instead of "scientific. — Richard Feynman

Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist. — John Le Carre

If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago ... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism. — Fritjof Capra

Could many of our ills today have resulted from our failure to train a strong citizenry from the only source we have - the boys and girls of each community? Have they grown up to believe in politics without principle, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without effort, wealth without work, business without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice? — Ezra Taft Benson

In my nutritional philosophy, tradition has weight. After all, we've survived anywhere from 7,000 to 77,000 generations on this planet (depending on whose science you believe). If we didn't know how to adequately nourish our children all that time, how did we even get here? And guess what? Traditional cultures didn't (and don't) feed their young babies infant cereal. Among the few cultures that fed their babies a gruel of grains, their practice radically differed from what we do today. They would either pre-chew the gruel for their babies until they were at least a year old, or the gruel was mildly fermented by soaking the grains for 24 hours or more. — Kristen Michaelis

As a matter of fact, we are wired for connection. It's in our biology. From the time we are born, we need connection to thrive emotionally, physically, spiritually, and intellectually. A decade ago, the idea that we're "wired for connection" might have been perceived as touchy-feely or New Age. Today, we know that the need for connection is more than a feeling or a hunch. It's hard science. Neuroscience, to be exact. — Brene Brown

[To the cultures of Asia and the continent of Africa] it is the Western impact which has stirred up the winds of change and set the processes of modernization in motion. Education brought not only the idea of equality but also another belief which we used to take for granted in the West-the idea of progress, the idea that science and technology can be used to better human conditions. In ancient society, men tended to believe themselves fortunate if tomorrow was not worse than today and anyway, there was little they could do about it. — Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today - that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed. — Margaret Atwood

You create reality by looking at it, is what Quantum Mechanics suggests. This may sound outrageously magical. Quantum Mechanics or QM, is the physics of the microscopic world. It is a strange theory that took birth in the early 20th century and continues to dazzle scientists and philosophers today. So much so, that QM is regarded as the gateway to the world of consciousness, bringing science and spiritualty together. Science has entered domain of philosophy and consciousness/spirituality through Quantum Mechanics, making it a hot topic for debate among intellectuals from both scientific and philosophical domains. Some physicists even insist on making philosophy of physics! — Sharad Nalawade

I don't know why but I love this kind of project, when it's a little difficult and when you have a history. The beginning of the story of viticulture was in the Middle East, and it was a different generation than the science and logistics of today. My passion is to go into the past to make wine. Wine is something cultural, not only something to drink. I always try to find the identity of the place. — Stephane Derenoncourt

Today we have different idols. . . We have trusted in human reason, science, and technology to solve our problems and progress toward a better world and a prosperous life. Yet idolatry brings death. — Craig G. Bartholomew

Physics has never been a comfortable subject for human psychology. The desire to regard everything outside the human race's purview as insignificant, and everything within that purview as firmly under the control of tribal myth and custom, is as strong today as it was in the time of Galileo. — Celia Green

Every reflection today, whether nihilist or positivist, gives birth, sometimes without knowing it, to
standards that science itself confirms. The quantum theory, relativity, the uncertainty of interrelationships,
define a world that has no definable reality except on the scale of average
greatness, which is our own. The ideologies which guide our world were born in the time of absolute
scientific discoveries. Our real knowledge, on the other hand, only justifies a system of thought based on
relative discoveries. "Intelligence," says Lazare Bickel, "is our faculty for not developing what we think
to the very end, so that we can still believe in reality." Approximative thought is the only creator of
reality. — Albert Camus

Wells is teaching us to think. Burroughs and his lesser imitators are teaching us not to think. Of course, Burroughs is teaching us to wonder. The sense of wonder is in essence a religious state, blanketing out criticism. Wells was always a critic, even in his most wondrous and romantic tales.

And there, I believe, the two poles of modern fantasy stand defined. At one pole wait Wells and his honorable predecessors such as Swift; at the other, Burroughs and the commercial producers, such as Otis Adelbart Kline, and the weirdies, and horror merchants such as H.P. Lovecraft, and so all the way past Tolkien to today's non-stop fantasy worlders. Mary Shelley stands somewhere at the equator of this metaphor. — Brian W. Aldiss

Ever so often in the history of human endeavour, there comes a breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier into a new era ... today's announcement is such a breakthrough, a breakthrough that opens the way for massive advancement in the treatment of cancer and hereditary diseases. And that is only the beginning. — Tony Blair

The state of healthcare today is that we are busy in the practice of medicine vs. being in the science of medicine. — Vinod Khosla

In Our Underachieving Colleges, [Derek] Bok acts as both diagnostician and healer, wielding social-science statistics and professional studies to trace the etiology of today's illnesses and to recommend palliative treatments for what he has discovered. — Donald Kagan

It must be admitted that scientists today take little interest in philosophy of science.... It is not an indication that philosophical issues are no longer relevant. Rather, it is a consequence of the increasingly specialized nature of science, and of the polarization between the sciences and humanities that characterizes the modern education system. — Samir Okasha

The theory of the earth is the science which describes and explains changes that the terrestrial globe has undergone from its beginning until today, and which allows the prediction of those it shall undergo in the future. The only way to understand these changes and their causes is to study the present-day state of the globe in order to gradually reconstruct its earlier stages, and to develop probable hypotheses on its future state. Therefore, the present state of the earth is the only solid base on which the theory can rely. — Horace-Benedict De Saussure

Nutrition science, which after all only got started less than two hundred years ago, is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650 - very promising, and very interesting to watch, but are you ready to let them operate on you? I think I'll wait awhile. — Michael Pollan

to have a physical body and to work with it and to work with the forces of nature to mold it into the highest expression of joy, and to keep it always by using it to learn how to overcome disease, impairment and as today's cutting edge, non-funded, objective, purposeful science says, one day, even death? What if short-term excitement and intensity created by the overblown desire to win at all cost could be replaced by a more durable excitement in an intensity springing from the heart of the physical athletic experience itself? It would soon be discovered that sports and physical activities reformed and refurbished with integrity, not buy-offs are the best possible path to personal enlightenment and social transformation for this new millennium. — Don Tolman

In the '70s and '80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science. — John Maeda

Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today - the age of science - science fiction is our mythology. — Michael Shermer

Science advances by trial and error. When mistakes are made, the peer-review publication process usually roots them out. Cuccinelli's version of the scientific process would be "make an error and go to trial." Einstein did not arrive at E=mc2 in his first attempt. If he were working in the state of Virginia under Cuccinelli today, he could be jailed for his initial mistakes and perhaps never achieve that landmark equation. — Scott Mandia

Certain elements of today's ecological crisis reveal its moral character. First among these is the indiscriminate application of advances in science and technology. Many recent discoveries have brought undeniable benefits to humanity. Indeed, they demonstrate the nobility of the human vocation to participate responsibly in God's creative action in the world. Unfortunately, it is now clear that the application of these discoveries in the fields of industry and agriculture have produced harmful long-term effects. — Pope John Paul II

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you'd need to be the chairman of MIT's computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. "By 2020, a chip with today's processing power will cost about a penny," CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 "which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries - cell phone, Internet - that we all seem to take for granted. — Peter H. Diamandis

Although the way ahead [for immunology] is full of pitfalls and difficulties, this is indeed an exhilarating prospect. There is no danger of a shortage of forthcoming excitement in the subject. Yet, as always, the highlights of tomorrow are the unpredictabilities of today. — Cesar Milstein

Before a marketer can build trust, it must breed familiarity. But there's no familiarity without awareness. And awareness - the science of letting people know you exist and getting them to understand your message - can't happen effectively in today's environment without advertising. — Seth Godin

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war. — Nikola Tesla

In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today's physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Now from science we have a new creation story, which is very alluring and very exciting. It's not about deposing all the other wisdom stories about creation that humanity has gathered, but it certainly supplements it. It offers a real universal view because it's beyond any particular religion, ethnicity, nation and so forth. As we're struggling as a species to come together as a tribe, it provides us our basic framework, because it's from creation stories that ethics derive. Today's creation story from science is that we come from 14 billion years of an organic unfolding of the universe and are connected physiologically with every being in the universe. We all share the same atoms and the same molecules. That's truly significant and important at this time in history. We're all kin, we're all interdependent. And that's the basis of compassion, which was Jesus's ultimate teaching. — David L. Felten

Today the earth speaks with resonance and clearness and every ear in every civilized country of the world is attuned to its wonderful message of the creative evolution of man, except the ear of William Jennings Bryan; he alone remains stone-deaf, he alone by his own resounding voice drowns the eternal speech of nature. — Henry Fairfield Osborn

In ancient times there was no public education, except that of the forum, the theater, and the street, and the general degree of illiteracy was very high ... the early men of science were left very much to themselves and such a phrase as "the scientific culture of Alexandria in the third century B.C." does not cover any reality. In a sense, this is still true today; the real pioneers are so far ahead of the crowd (even a very literate crowd) that they remain almost alone ... — George Sarton

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.
[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.] — William Shockley

Bill Boeing first articulated the company's basic philosophy a century ago: 'We are embarked as pioneers upon a new science and industry in which our problems are so new and unusual that it behooves no one to dismiss any novel idea with the statement 'It can't be done.' ' It is this philosophy that continues to drive Boeing today. — Russ Banham

Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights. — John Charles Polanyi

Science and its practice are no longer free and willing today but instead are constantly terrorized by research funding gravy trains and group thinking. This is why science needs defending and it takes courage to cleanse science from those cancerous elements and to bring her forward in its rightful place again. I am humbled and honored by this recognition. — Willie Soon

We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow. — Charles Lindbergh

Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions. — John Gray

Science today betrays its origins and denies its own acquisitions in allowing itself to be put to the.
service of State terrorism and the desire for power. Its punishment and its degradation lie in only being
able to produce, in an abstract world, the means of destruction and enslavement. But when the limit is
reached, science will perhaps serve the individual rebellion. This terrible necessity will mark the decisive
turning-point. — Albert Camus

The flight of most members of a profession to the high empyrean, where they can work peacefully on purely scientific problems, isolated from the turmoil of real life, was perhaps quite appropriate at an earlier stage of science; but in today's world it is a luxury we cannot afford. — Gerald Holton

... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Today science prevails not because of its comparative merits, but because the show has been rigged in its favour ... It reigns supreme because some past successes have led to institutional measures (education; role of experts; role of power groups such as the AMA) that prevent a comeback of the rivals. — Paul Feyerabend

I don't know what your Company is feeling as of today about the work of Dr. Alice Hamilton on benzol [benzene] poisoning. I know that back in the old days some of your boys used to think that she was a plain nuisance and just picking on you for luck. But I have a hunch that as you have learned more about the subject, men like your good self have grown to realize the debt that society owes her for her crusade. I am pretty sure that she has saved the lives of a great many girls in can-making plants and I would hate to think that you didn't agree with me. — Bradley Dewey

Science is defined in the dictionaries as the pursuit of the unknown; yet science today is coming more and more to insist that it not be bothered with this, and it has reached a point where anything that is not already known is frowned upon. — Ivan T. Sanderson

["The Devil in the Dark"] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn. — Arthur C. Clarke

Most children, even very bright ones, need constant review and practice to truly own a concept in grammar, math or science. In schools today, on paper it may appear that kids are learning skills, but in reality they are only renting them, soon to forget what they've learned over the weekend or summer vacation. — Rafe Esquith

The more we know about this universe, the more mysterious it is. The old world that Job knew was marvelous enough, and his description of its wonders is among the noblest poetry of the race, but today the new science has opened to our eyes vistas of mystery that transcend in their inexplicable marvel anything the ancients ever dreamed. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

The Jetsons had them in the 1960s. They were the defining element of 'Knight Rider' in the 1980s: cars that drive themselves. Self-driving cars appear in countless science fiction movies. By Hollywood standards, they are so normal we don't even notice them. But in real life, they still don't exist. What if you could buy one today? — Sebastian Thrun

We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as Nazi researchers did. — Paul Nitze

Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face, possibly in these same primeval forests. That we are here today evidences their victory.
What they did may we not do? And even better, for are we not armed with ages of superior knowledge, and have we not the means of protection, defense, and sustenance which science has given us, but of which they were totally ignorant? What they accomplished, Alice, with instruments and weapons of stone and bone, surely that may we accomplish also. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery. — Michio Kaku

Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if ... priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering. — Napoleon Bonaparte

I understand that you believe that it works,' said Thrower patiently. 'But everything in the world is either science or miracles. Miracles came from God in the ancient times, but those times are over. Today if we wish to change the world, it isn't magic but science that will give us our tools. — Orson Scott Card

Teachers seeking to 'teach the controversy' over Darwinian evolution in today's climate will likely be met with false warnings that it is unconstitutional to say anything negative about Darwinian evolution. Students who attempt to raise questions about Darwinism, or who try to elicit from the teacher an honest answer about the status of intelligent design theory will trigger administrators' concerns about whether they stand in Constitutional jeopardy. A chilling effect on open inquiry is being felt in several states already, including Ohio. South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. [District Court] Judge Jones's message is clear: give Darwin only praise, or else face the wrath of the judiciary. — David K. DeWolf

For example, the idea that objects have properties out there in fixed ways is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and processes. They are not inherent in electrons or photons or quanta any more than they are inherent in soil or trees or people. So my critique of reductionistic science is a critique that I have inherited from my scientific training. But it has been deepened by my experiences as an ecologist, in seeing the ecological destruction taking place today. — Vandana Shiva

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world. — Michael Denton

Just as today science recognizes the constant recurrence of simple, tiny atomic particles in all sort of organized matter, our ancestors had the intuition that there was a secret rhythm in Nature which was the same in every single natural manifestation. A crane dance must mirror star dances, and human dance is an alphabet to decipher the unknown. — Pippa Pralen

As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it. — Julian Huxley

The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile ... — Malcolm Muggeridge

Men sneered at vivisection, and yet look at its results today! Why not advance science in its most difficult and vital aspect, the knowledge of the brain? — Bram Stoker

If it is true that an influx of doubt and uncertainty actually marks periods of healthy growth in a science, then evolutionary biology is flourishing today as it seldom has flourished in the past. For biologists collectively are less agreed upon the details of evolutionary mechanics than they were a scant decade ago. Superficially, it seems as if we know less about evolution than we did in 1959, the centennial year of Darwin's on the Origin of Species. — Niles Eldredge

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take. — Fritjof Capra

Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can't close your ears. The reason you can't close your ears is, if a lion was coming, you had to wake up. Today no lions are coming. Beeping trucks are coming. I read the other day that the guy who invented the beep when trucks go backward, he died. I thought: Of course-he dies, I have to listen to it. — Fran Lebowitz

There is no tomorrow. Time cannot be saved and spent. There is only today and how we choose to live it. The future is unknowable and unpredictable; it offers no clear path to happiness. Science will not save us. Each of us, then, needs to cobble together a daily routine filled with basic human pleasures, wedded, to be sure, to the best that modernity has to offer. It is a life of compromise rather than extremes. It is a touch of the old and a taste of the new. And cooking, it seems to me, offers the most direct way back into the very heart of the good life. It is useful, it is necessary, it is social, and it offers immediate pleasure and satisfaction. It connects with the past and ensures the future. Standing in front of a hot oven, we remind ourselves of who we are, of what we are capable of and how we might stumble back to the center of happiness. Effort and pleasure go hand in hand. — Christopher Kimball

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. Lofty goals such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds. In all eras, across time and culture, only war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power have fulfilled that funding requirement. Today, the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in nonarchitectural undertakings, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war. But war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

To look into some aspects of the future, we do not need projections by supercomputers. Much of the next millennium can be seen in how we care for our children today. Tomorrow's world may be influenced by science and technology, but more than anything, it is already taking shape in the bodies and minds of our children. — Kofi Annan

In just the last issue of Science Today there had been an article on some new psychotropic agents of the group of so-called benignimizers (the N,N-dimethylpeptocryptomides), which induced states of undirected joy and beatitude. Yes, yes! I could practically see that article now. Hedonidil, Euphoril, Inebrium, Felicitine, Empathan, Ecstasine, Halcyonal and a whole spate of derivatives. Though by replacing an amino group with a hydroxyl, you obtained instead Furiol, Antagonil, Rabiditine, Sadistizine, Dementium, Flagellan, Juggernol and many other polyparanoidal stimulants of the group of so-called phrensobarbs (for these prompted the most vicious behavior, the lashing out at objects animate as well as inanimate - and especially powerful here were the cannibal-cannabinols and manicomimetics). — Stanislaw Lem

After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past. — Loren Eiseley

Today, over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math, science technology and engineering, yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

Using the latest in science and technology to shatter today's economic paradigm of 'insatiable individuals competing for scarce resources,' Planetary Citizenship brings us full circle to the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples and the sacredness of creation. — Rebecca Adamson

Based on the experience of history and civilization of mankind, which is more important for Muslims today, to no longer busy discussing the greatness that Muslims achieved in the past, or debating who first discovered the number zero, including the number one, two, three and so on, as the contribution of Muslims in the writing of numbers in this modern era and the foundation and development of civilizations throughout the world. But how Muslims will regained the lead and control of science and technology, leading back and become a leader in the world of science and civilization, because it represents a real achievement. — Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie

In particular, if consciousness is an ontological fundamental-that is, a primary element of reality-then it may have the power to achieve what is both the best-documented and at the same time the spookiest effect of the m ind on the material world: the ability of consciousness to transform the infinite possibilities for, say, the position of a subatomic particle as described by quantum mechanics into the single reality for that position as detected by an observer. If that sounds both mysterious and spooky, it is a spookiness that has been a part of science since almost the beginning of the twentieth century. It was physics that first felt the breath of this ghost, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and it is in the field of neuroscience and the problem of mind and matter that its ethereal presence is felt most markedly today. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

She's shed her skins
and plasma jeans, gets around in 2K
retro gear like the frock she wears today;
a loose, white elegy to what's been lost.
Already she's flowing back into herself
the way a river flows to fill a creek bed.
But some hard layer has washed away
and left her softer, more interested. — Lisa Jacobson

My single greatest challenge is to remain centered and loving in an overwhelmingly nonvegan world. In today's world, cruelty and exploitation of other beings - human and non-human alike - are accepted, practiced, and profited from by most every institution of society - from commerce and science to education and entertainment. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Homo sapiens are either unaware of the cruelty or accept it as unavoidable and even normal. — Michael Klaper

People today are so accustomed to pretentious nonsense that they see nothing amiss in reading without understanding, and many of them at length discover that they can without difficulty write in like manner themselves and win applause for it. And so it perpetuates itself. — George Albert Wells

Methodological naturalism is a "ground rule" of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify — Robert T. Pennock

As science is more and more subject to grave misuse as well as to use for human benefit it has also become the scientist's responsibility to become aware of the social relations and applications of his subject, and to exert his influence in such a direction as will result in the best applications of the findings in his own and related fields. Thus he must help in educating the public, in the broad sense, and this means first educating himself, not only in science but in regard to the great issues confronting mankind today. — Hermann Joseph Muller

What is superstition , but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb. — Fritz Leiber

But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose. — Christine Kenneally

Although there exist in the world today some microbes of the soul, such as discrimination and aggression, science was and still is the core of progress for humanity and the continuity of civilization. — Ahmed Zewail

Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable. — Walter Lang

Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer. — John N. Gray

Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today. — Michael Ruse

I think today the church faces a very real challenge in not repeating the errors of the past, in sort of a stand off, a fear of science. — George Coyne

Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today ... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty. — William Osler

While science is now moving closer to documenting the effects of other-dimensional realities, even with the best technology in the world today, science can only observe effects, not the reality itself. — Elaine Seiler

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only world picture which we can consider as valid. It gives an understanding of the inside of the atom and of the whole universe, or the peculiar properties of the chemical substances and of the manner in which genes duplicate in biology. An educated layman can, of course, not contribute to science, but can enjoy and participate in many scientific discoveries which as constantly made. Such participation was quite common in the 19th century, but has unhappily declined. Literacy in science will enrich a person's life. — Hans Bethe

It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its use for the magic opening of the temple doors, when the priests lit the fires on the altars, to deceive the populace into ascribing to a deity what was the work of the engineer. In much the same way today, the almost boundless fecundity of the creative scientific discoveries and inventions of the age are being appropriated for the purpose of the mysterious opening of doors into the holy of holies of the temples of mammon by a hierarchy of imposters and humbugs, whom it is the first task of a sane civilization to expose and clear out. — Frederick Soddy

While we may lose track of certain goals intermittently throughout the decades, I think we as a nation can be nimble when we need to be. All the buzz today is on the need for science literacy. That is on the agenda in ways it hasn't been in previous decades. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body's powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years ... Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth. — Joel Fuhrman