Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.
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."
The botanist who studies the flora of a distant country is compelled to admit that the very plants which seem most strikingly unlike anything in his own country are, when he comes to know them, simply variations of types with which he is perfectly familiar.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
The man of science must work with method and system, but the artist works by inspiration, and what the artist produces by inspiration the man of science can explain by analysis only after the fact.
The mind has not merely made a discovery of external fact; it has altered its own character by the attempt to know external fact.
We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
We live on the surface of a star, and we are made of the dust of stars. The atoms in our bodies were forged in the hearts of dying stars billions of years ago.
The mind has not merely made a discovery of external fact; it has altered its own nature. It has become capable of rising above the present and the particular to the conception of law, of growth, of progress.
The notion that science and spirituality are forever at war is the invention of twits who understand neither.
It was the seed for the marvelously multifaceted field of astrobiology, at the beating heart of which is the question not of where life is but what life is.
Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago). That's when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body fat to intelligence were most in flux. Over the last 10,000 years, selection pushed the genetic predictor of cognitive performance up by roughly a full standard deviation — most of it between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago.
Researchers have developed three new antibiotics from scorpion venom and habanero peppers to combat tuberculosis and other drug-resistant pathogens.
The paradox of our time is that although we now know that consciousness itself is a full-body phenomenon, we have continued our campaign of denying the animal nature of the human animal by negating the significance, the relevance, the very fact of the body.
Most objects we transport around the world tolerate their containers. They sit in them, press against them, get held by them. Even the most sensitive cargo, from organs to antiquities, vaccines to wild animals, exist in material continuity with the surrounding world. Antimatter is categorically other. It's not fragile in a way that patience and care can manage simply, because it's constitutively incompatible with everything that exists.
We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We have come from the interstellar medium and into the form of conscious beings able to ask the supreme questions.
Clearly human science is able to make progress faster than raw experimental falsification/verification would imply, and in cases where experiments are very ambiguous.
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
Start saving quotes →