Words matter. These are the best Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.
Donald Trump called for the closing of borders to Muslims; John McCain said, in response to the President’s address on the San Bernardino shooting, that ‘this is the war of our time.’ As that shooting shows, we react to terrorism with far more intensity than we do to an ordinary crime.
We should teach kids how to question. Now having said that, of course, to be a productive adult, there are certain skills that are required – reading, writing, and, in the old-fashioned days, we used to say arithmetic. Now we say mathematics.
The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.
Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry.
A significant fraction of evangelical voters appear more likely to ignore the candidates’ specific economic and foreign policy platforms in favor of concerns about gay marriage or abortion.
A snowflake is another beautifully ordered example of what simple, natural meteorological processes can produce. Stars form by gravity, collapsing into spherically ordered structures that can remain in this form only if they release tremendous heat energy into the environment.
If I knew what the next big thing was, I’d be doing it now.
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
I have always felt that, aside from research that violates universal human mores, when it comes to technological applications, that which can be done will be done.
I don’t know if science and reason will ultimately help guide humanity to a better and more peaceful future, but I am certain that this belief is part of what keeps the ‘Star Trek’ fandom going.
For a man with an impressive educational C.V., Ben Carson makes a lot of intellectual missteps.
The root cause of the looming energy problem – and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health – is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.
The Bible is full of dubious scientific impossibilities, from Jonah living inside a whale, to the sun standing still in the sky for Joshua.
The notion that anyone in the 21st century could take seriously the notion that the sun orbits the Earth, or that the Earth is the center of the universe, is almost unbelievable.
Parents, of course, have concerns and ‘say,’ but they don’t have the right to shield their children from knowledge. That is not a right, any more than they have the right to shield their children from healthcare or medicine.
If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.
We need to walk into the future, no matter how unnerving, with open eyes if society is to keep pace with technology.
I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was younger.
I am in favor of saying, ‘Okay, let’s get teams of educators and experts in certain disciplines to say, ‘What are the basic things that we think are an essential part of an early education for people?” Put them together and create, as well as possible, a set of goals and tools to learn those things.
Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they’re really doing is mathematics – it’s not talking about things that have affected computer science; it’s mathematical logic.
I was most eager to see how Trump would respond to the climate-change question.
One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don’t, subject to the constraints of the law.
For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.
When a person’s religious beliefs cause him to deny the evidence of science, or for whom public policy morphs into a battle with the devil, shouldn’t that be a subject for discussion and debate?
If innovations were predictable, they wouldn’t be discoveries.
I can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but I’d much rather live in a universe without one.
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.
It’s all too easy to imagine Trump issuing an ultimate, thermonuclear ‘You’re fired!’ to China, Iran, or another nation – and perhaps to the whole human race.
On the question of preserving public lands, Trump replies that our elected officials have spent too long rewarding ‘special interests,’ by which I assume he doesn’t mean petroleum companies and the Bundy family.
Feynman once said, ‘Science is imagination in a straitjacket.’ It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.
Either Trump only talks to those who play up to his delusion, or he simply doesn’t listen to those who might burst his bubble. Either way, that is a cause for worry.
Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.
When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.
One thing I cannot understand – and people are probably going to be upset about this – is why local school boards have control over educational content.
These days, gun violence can strike anywhere, from a church hall in Charleston to a movie theatre or a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado. But our response to it depends on whether that violence is understood to be terrorism.
When considering real-world issues, particularly those that touch on science and technology, it is harder to speak in platitudes or rely purely on emotion or fear. Substance, or its lack, becomes harder to mimic or mask, which is why I wish we had a true televised presidential debate on these subjects.
Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.
Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.
