The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.
The tendency of modern science is to reduce all natural phenomena to the action of matter, and to explain the complex by the simple. But this tendency has its dangers; it may lead us to forget that the simple is always an abstraction, and that the real world is infinitely complex.
We are under a heavy debt to those who first broke the crust of ignorance, even though what they discovered may be of no direct use to us. It is not the finding but the seeking that is most consequential.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. And yet this refinement is purchased at a terrible price — the price of losing touch with the concrete and the living, and of substituting for it a pale, bloodless abstraction.
It is not so much that man has evolved from the ape, as that both have evolved from a common ancestor — and the difference between a man who sees this and one who does not is not a difference of knowledge, but of imagination.
The disquieting question of whether zero is out there or a fiction will call up the perennial puzzle of whether we invent or discover the way of things, hence the yet deeper issue of where we are in the hierarchy. Are we creatures or creators, less than – or only a little less than ― the angels in our power to appraise?
It is not observation of nature that makes a man thoughtful; it is the fact that nature never answers. The grown man asks, and asks, and the sphinx remains silent, and suddenly he remembers that it always has been so.
The universe is not indifferent to intelligence; it simply has not yet been asked the right questions. But the asking itself changes both the asker and the universe.
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. And yet the history of science is largely the history of our stubborn insistence that it must be.
We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and often the beast stirs in us and utters some old, forgotten note that sends strange vibrations through the framework of our being.
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
We are beginning to see that to ask what is the use of science is as vulgar as to ask what is the use of a sunset, and almost as stupid.
An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.
The photograph, taken in visible light, made it possible to observe for the first time the tiny plasma vortices that had been predicted for more than a century.
The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress on the minute study of details, and to overlook the great generalizations. It is the study of generalizations that liberates the human mind.
It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend it. And that is a political choice that each of us has to make.
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.
The impact will kick up a plume of debris so high, it'll likely be visible through some telescopes. Astronomers will be watching.
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. It is indifferent to our need for certainty, and it is precisely this indifference that makes the pursuit of understanding so urgent.
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.
Every really new idea looks crazy at first. Every important scientific advance has had to fight its way to acceptance against the prejudice of its age — and the prejudice of its age is simply the common sense of its age.
The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience with which Spinoza must have waited for years to see his cherished conception of a mathematical proof of the existence of God.
A fact acquires its true and full value only through the idea which is developed from it.
It took Einstein, one of the most famous minds in history, about a decade to figure it out. But when I teach it I'll do a 10-week course, and in 10 weeks people will get a better idea of general relativity than Einstein really had in 10 years. That's because we have an advantage that Einstein didn't have. We have Einstein, and many others like him going before us, who've been able to take these super complicated ideas—understood at the time as being totally incomprehensible by anybody with a sub-Einstein level of intelligence—and boil them down to their essentials, and not make many of the same mistakes that were made by our forebears.
The US built its scientific leadership over eighty years through a simple and elegant idea: the government funds the basic research that no private actor has the time horizon or risk tolerance to fund, and that foundational work eventually becomes the commercial infrastructure that generates returns for everyone. You can't defund the headwaters and then wonder why the river runs dry.
We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and hold within us the sheep, the lion, and the eagle of our forefathers. Strange kinships bind us to the creatures of field and forest, and the blood in our veins runs down from a time when the world was young.
Kate Adamala, the lead researcher behind SpudCell, argues that the core functions of life 'do not need some magical spark.' With SpudCell, we may be able to begin engineering life from scratch, instead of starting with an E.coli.
The plate tectonics model that would arise from her discovery would go on to change our understanding of life itself: Tectonic activity mixes surface and ocean chemistry, recycling elements to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature stable, and is what allowed Earth's waters to remain liquid for the billions of years that complex life needed to evolve. Without it, we would have never risen from the oceans to measure the
Two hundred and fifty years seems like a long time, but it's just three peoples' lifetimes at current averages. It would have been six lifetimes back then, except the average American's life expectancy has doubled over the past 250 years.
The animal that wins in the struggle for existence is the one that is most successfully adapted to its environment, and yet the environment is always changing. The only permanence is the permanence of change.
A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air — an enormous eye tuned to the light of the universe.
Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. But respiratory infections are technically challenging and they've been underfunded, so we haven't made much progress against them.
There will be tourism, and prestige luxury merchandise (Zubrin submits that the settlers might export artificial Martian diamonds tinted with a regolith hue). Perhaps they could sell the broadcast rights to low-gravity spectator sports like rover racing or something "comparable to the exhilarating Quidditch games" in Harry Potter; on Mars, Zubrin points out, "basketball players will be able to jump three times as high."
Today, we know that diatoms — thousands of species of unicellular algae, each a living Noether theorem housed in a shell of opal — are not created for admiration but create the admirer: Every life-form on Earth depends on them.
The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls.
Basically, scientists can't see the proteins inside of a cell in real-time in their natural environment. They can image ~10% of the proteins once they're pulled out and purified, using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), or < 1% when they're actually working inside a cell, but most of our cell's proteins operate in the shadows.
The naturalist hardly expects to be believed when he relates the instincts of animals; yet the physiologist is compelled to believe them, because he cannot explain them away.
The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
The universe is not a machine after all but something more like a mind. It is more like a thought made flesh than like a machine made of matter.
The boundary between living and non-living matter is not a sharp line but a broad zone of increasing complexity, and to ask where life begins is like asking where a forest begins as one walks from open country into woodland.
The work is based on Japanese Nobel Laureate Shinya Yamanaka's eponymous Yakanama Factors, four genes that can rewind any adult cell all the way back to a stem-cell state. The problem is, a reset retina cell forgets it's a retina cell. So Life Bio uses three of the four factors (dropping c-Myc, the one most tied to cancer) and nudges the cells only partway back: younger, but still themselves.
The demand of the human intellect is for a world in which something is permanently true. Science gives us a world in which everything is provisionally true — which is not at all the same thing.
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To the large mind of the astronomer it is neither cruel nor kind, but only stupendous — and that is almost worse than cruelty.
It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena. We ought to accept a theory if it predicts things which observation subsequently confirms, and if no rival theory is equally successful.
The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a convention of cartographers.
It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.
The therapy didn't help them metabolize alcohol faster. It restored the liver cells' intrinsic ability to withstand stress and regenerate, as if they were young again.
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. But stranger still is the fact that it does — partially, provisionally, and always at the cost of uprooting what we thought we already knew.
But no one, not even Einstein himself, imagined that this purely theoretical revolution would have practical applications that would alter the fabric of human life — relativity was the paragon of "useless knowledge."
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