Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've got no religious beliefs at all.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The universe is still a place of mystery and wonder.
The advance of science spares us from irrational dread.
Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but they cannot be uninvented.
God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
Science isn't just for scientists - it's not just a training for careers.
It's important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don't know.
I'm not myself religious but have no wish to insult or denigrate those who are.
All space projects push the frontiers of technology and are drivers of innovation.
An insect is more complex than a star..and is a far greater challenge to understand.
Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.
There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.
I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.
One of President Obama's first acts was to give a massive boost to America's scientific community.
Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth.
The 'clean energy' challenge deserves a commitment akin to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing.
Some of the 'aha' insights that scientists strive for may have to await the emergence of post-human intellects.
I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.
Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.
General writing about science, even if we do it badly, helps us to see our work in perspective and broadens our vision.
The politics is far harder than the science. And even if we accept the science we have a big issue of how to deal with it.
The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime.
It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science-it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong.
I think all countries need to aim to cut the CO2 emissions per person, taking account of externalities like imports and exports.
Science shouldn't be just for scientists, and there are encouraging signs that it is becoming more pervasive in culture and the media.
To ensure continuing prosperity in the global economy, nothing is more important than the development and application of knowledge and skills.
Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just 'virtual reality.'
We need to broaden our sympathies both in space and time - and perceive ourselves as part of a long heritage, and stewards for an immense future.
Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just "virtual reality".
Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.
It's often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science - it's far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.
Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations.
The U.S., France, Germany and Canada have all responded to the financial crisis by boosting rather than cutting their science funding. The U.K. has not.
Most practising scientists focus on 'bite-sized' problems that are timely and tractable. The occupational risk is then to lose sight of the big picture.
Whether it is to reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions or to prepare for when the coal and oil run out, we have to continue to seek out new energy sources.
We do not fully understand the consequences of rising populations and increasing energy consumption on the interwoven fabric of atmosphere, water, land and life.
We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.
The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.
It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.
Just as there are many Jews who keep the Friday ritual in their home despite describing themselves as atheists, I am a 'tribal Christian,' happy to attend church services.
It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, six billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.
Indeed, evolutionists don't agree on how divergently our own biosphere could have developed if such contingencies as ice ages and meteorite impacts had happened differently.
If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can't have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.
Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it's the one culture we can all share.
Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can't-afford-it attitude.
The extreme sophistication of modern technology - wonderful though its benefits are - is, ironically, an impediment to engaging young people with basics: with learning how things work.
In future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in our Solar system.
From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.
The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured. It's uncontroversial. It's going up. We know that has a tendency to warm the atmosphere and we should be worried about that.