#science

"When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?"

"There is safety in numbers. And science. Clone your way to being safe. Nobody can protect you like you. And you and you and you."

"[When asked why are numbers beautiful?]It’s like asking why is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is."

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

"There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics."

"It’s hard to build models of inflation that don't lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously."

"We're very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they're beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can't see them under our big noses."

"Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

"While the art of printing is left to us science can never be retrograde; what is once acquired of real knowledge can never be lost."

"The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible."

"Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence."

"So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the trouble — though it would definitely be green."

"There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain."

"We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly."

"Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved."

"It's true; life really is generous to those who pursue their Personal Legend."

"The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies."

"Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it."

"Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares."