Artists and scientists are very close. They always have been, but I think we’ve just been divided out over the last few centuries into specialisms. Leonardo da Vinci was drawing helicopters and all kinds of things. We’re artificially divided. I think we’re closer than we think we are.
Scientists cloister themselves away from the rest of society, happy just to receive their next grant. They lose their connection to a purpose.
Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
Almost half our representatives in Washington apparently know more about science than our scientists. Or they pretend to, because big corporations give them a lot of money to make sure they can keep doing the destructive things that they do.
A major feature of life at the NIH in late 1960s was the extraordinary offering of evening courses for physicians attempting to become scientists as they neared thirty.
If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable.
I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.
Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it’s a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.
We scientists have an obsession with unification, a grand synthesis. And dark matter is an irritating missing piece.
It is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available date about identity for social scientists; it is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.
I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.
It has only been within my lifetime that asteroids have been considered a credible threat to our planet. And since then, there’s been a focused effort underway to discover and catalog these objects. I am lucky enough to be part of this effort. I’m part of a team of scientists that use NASA’s NEOWISE telescope.
We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren’t seeing the soul in there.
Literally, my earliest memory, my earliest vivid memory, is the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Yeah, I was in fourth grade, and I was just so captivated. And I think you’ll find a lot of space scientists of my generation will say the same thing. Apollo was a big event for them.
Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.
What is so clearly in the national interest is everything the government is doing in its strong, one nation domestic policy agenda: more police on the streets, more doctors and nurses in our hospitals, a welcoming face to scientists and international students.
Scientists have shown that pigs are capable of playing simple video games, learning from each other, and even learning names.
I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn’t very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.
In my own career, I have always tried to treat my colleagues with respect and kindness, whoever they are, and am proud to have developed and mentored the careers of many excellent young scientists who will be tackling tomorrow’s biological problems long after I have left the scene.
It is a fact that scientists have deposited dye in certain lakes around Orlando and tracked the effluent to Florida Bay. There is a lake near Everglades City, Deep Lake, and large tarpon show up in that lake, 30 miles from the sea.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
Talking with economists, climate scientists, and psychologists convinced me that depersonalizing climate change, such that the only answers are systemic, is a mistake of its own. It misses how social change is built on a foundation of individual practice.
Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests – is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn’t offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.
Why is it that I notice so many brilliant scientists using Macs for their personal computers; why does the Lawrence Livermore & Berkeley Labs buy millions of dollars worth of Macs?
Scientists under all forms of government must be able to participate fully in international efforts.
I’ve always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.
Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life – plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support.
Scientists and supercomputers have amplified our ability to look ahead. For decades, experts have warned us that human numbers, technology, hyper-consumption and a global economy are altering the chemical, geological, and biological properties of the biosphere.
One important part of scientific training is that scientists learn the boundaries, the safety issues, how to properly deal with and dispose of chemicals and reagents.
I’m a scientist – a geobiologist who’s been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized that I wanted, needed, to tell people – and not just other scientists – about my life in science.
Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.
I would not necessarily say that scientists and artists need to collaborate with one another, but it would be helpful for them to talk to one another to, perhaps, give rise to specific ideas that may or may not be carried out together.
Despite all the progress climate scientists have made in understanding the risks we run by loading the atmosphere with CO2, the world is still as addicted to fossil fuels as ever.
We have little choice but to place a certain level of trust in scientists – even when it comes to the model-driven speculative discipline of climate change. And, need it be said, most scientists take great care in being honest, principled and precise.
Scientists are not movie stars or politicians who will feel insulted if they are not showered with accolades. Scientists are not interested in accolades.
In my experience, if people don’t have a sense of humor, they are usually not very good scientists, either.
The way to solve problems in the world is to become scientists and technologists and build things that haven’t been built before and discover things that people really don’t know about.
In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.
Scientists care deeply about their place in that culture, and their contribution to it.
Scientists are not these guys in lab coats deep in the inner bowels of universities and hospitals with their Bunsen burners. They’re the people molding the culture that we live in, the future of our culture, and the technology we rely on every day. These are the rock stars of our time right now.
I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It’s a trait of human nature that I’m particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters.
A company’s commitment to searching out potential blockbusters and then investing in marketing to convert potential to reality attracts and retains top scientists and creatives.
I hope to see the bringing together of all the best educated people of the earth into a worldwide Congress of Scientists.
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
Artists, musicians, scientists – if you have any kind of visionary aptitude, it’s often something that you don’t have a choice in. You have to do it.
Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.
One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.
Plastic debris in the ocean was thought to accumulate in big patches, mostly in subtropical gyres – big currents that converge in the middle of the ocean – but scientists estimate that only about 1 percent of plastic pollution is in these gyres and other surface waters in the open ocean.
