The problem for large scientific projects is to do something that is being done for the first time, balanced against cost, schedule. and promises to the government. That is a hard balancing act.
‘Interstellar’ may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.
If you look at my track record as government chief scientific advisor, I’ve always recognized that all of the sciences are important to all of research, and we need a balance.
New Horizons is a very high-tech, small, roughly 1,000-pound spacecraft with the most powerful battery of scientific instrumentation ever brought to bear on a first reconnaissance mission.
It’s a blessing in a scientific career – the almost daily thrill of scientific discovery.
Neither scientific laboratories nor excavation expeditions can unravel the human need to believe in a greater truth, a truth strangely made all the more grand and mysterious by the absence of empirical evidence.
I’ve had various experiences where I’ve been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they’re trying to inject into a story.
If a State has reliable scientific information that demonstrates that a warning is needed for a particular food, then in the interest of public health, it should share that information with the FDA and petition for a new national standard.
Moreover, only a strong and united scientific opinion imposing the intrinsic value of scientific progress on society at large can elicit the support of scientific inquiry by the general public.
I find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement.
The Saturn system is a rich planetary system. It offers mystery, scientific insight, and obviously splendour beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach… just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies.
Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.
I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?
Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.
However, it required some years before the scientific community in general accepted that flexibility and disorder are very relevant molecular properties also in other systems.
American voters tend to make their decisions based on a variety of vectors. Professional political satirists employ rather more scientific criteria. Namely: who will provide us with better material over the next four years?
I read things like theology, and I read about science, ‘Scientific American’ and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.
Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.
My main hope is eventually, in modern education field, introduce education about warm-heartedness, not based on religion, but based on common experience and a common sort of sense, and then scientific finding.
Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them – and they might hurt us – a lot less.
Today the biggest problem in caring for those with AIDS is no longer mainly a medical or scientific problem. The crisis is access to affordable drugs.
I often say in my speeches, I say, ‘It’s rare in life that you get a controlled scientific experiment.’ ‘Cause you can’t do controlled scientific experiments with real people, normally.
I like to see a good scientific bout by men who know the use of their hands but would rather walk twenty miles than see animals in strife.
In this time of budget cuts, we cannot forget that basic science is a building block for scientific innovation and economic growth in the information age.
After World War II, scientific research in the U.S. was well supported. In the 1960s, when I came to America, the sky was the limit, and this conducive atmosphere enabled many of us to pursue esoteric research that resulted in America winning the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes.
According to the 2000 ‘Report of the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation,’ the long-lasting effects of nuclear testing can be qualified in simple scientific terms: ‘Radiation exposure can damage living cells, causing death in some of them and modifying others.’
Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.
We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its beauty. Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of disappearing in our world.
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
Privacy about giving is counterproductive. There is solid scientific research showing that people are more likely to give if they can see that others are giving. The richest people, in particular, should be setting an example.
Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are both accepted as scientific fact even though they’re mutually exclusive. Albert Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for a unifying truth that would reconcile the two.
Socialism is… not only a way of life, but a certain scientific approach to social and economic problems.
Fans are always asking me where I get my ideas from. The answer is that I’m very curious, and I get inspiration from everywhere. I read the newspapers voraciously, so I know what’s going on in real crime. I pay attention to the strange stories people tell me, and I also read a lot of scientific and forensic journals.
Race has no genetic or scientific basis.
I also think we need to maintain distinctions – the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.
I think that it’s more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn’t go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.
But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.
I’m a closeted nerd. I studied Richard Dawkins. I watched every lecture. He’s sort of the leading scientific atheist of our time. He’s very provocative. His whole thing is science over spirituality.
Scientific knowledge is, by its nature, provisional. This is due to the fact that as time goes on, with the invention of better instruments, more data and better data hone our understanding further. Social, cultural, economic, and political context are relevant to our understanding of how science works.
We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.
We made more than just scientific discoveries… we rediscovered how much people love exploration.
In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.
Since most scientists are just a bit religious, and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific, we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole, while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.
We think that it is the best scientists working in the frontier fields of science who are best able to judge what is good and what is bad – if any – in the application of their scientific research.
