Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Topology and number theory are my faves.
To see some truths you must stand outside and look in.
The simpler the insight, the more profound the conclusion.
Forever is a very long time, especially the bit towards the end.
The use of animals in medical research remains absolutely essential.
I think there's a certain lyricism in the telling of a scientific story.
Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science.
Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough.
Perhaps we are all too small-minded to glimpse creation, even out little corner of it.
Writing a biography is not a love affair. It’s not a marriage. It’s a job, it’s a piece of work.
Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.
We have to wonder, if there is a multiverse, in some other patch of that multiverse are there creatures?
Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.
What we see of the universe is vast. We know that the universe is something like 90 billion light-years across.
Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it's a good death. Make sure you're not picking someone who just declined.
The Earth isn't an infinite sheet that carries on for ever, but it doesn't have an edge, either. It's compact and connected.
By looking at the details of the DNA, it is possible to chart the flow of your ancestry from your ultimate grandmother to more modern times.
I'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself, because space can wobble like a drum.
DNA is the messenger which illuminates that connection,handed down from generation to generation,carried,literally,in the bodies of my ancestors.
Are the different species defined by paleontologists - Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and ourselves, Homo sapiens - all part of the same gene pool or not?
If an institution has become so large that there is no alternative except for the taxpayers to provide support, should we allow so many institutions to exceed that kind of threshold?
I would say the connection between art and science is very tenuous for me. It's just that I'm interested in both. I don't think that my interest in art affects the kind of science that I do.
There's no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification. I'm always asked is there Greek DNA or an Italian gene, but, of course, there isn't. We're very closely related.
It would be kind of magical if we were just happening to be able to see right to some boundary and then something crazy happened beyond that, like galaxies ceased to exist. I mean, that just seems nuts.
I don't believe that math and nature respond to democracy. Just because very clever people have rejected the role of the infinite, their collective opinions, however weighty, won't persuade mother nature to alter her ways. Nature is never wrong.
We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that's where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it's instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.
We are all a complete mixture;yet at the same time,we are all related.Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor.This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us.Our genes did not just appear when we were born.They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations.
There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see, but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far away to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.
Sam Harris fearlessly describes a moral and intellectual emergency precipitated by religious fantasies--misguided beliefs that create suffering, that rationalize violence, that have endangered our nation and our future. His argument for the morality, the honesty, and the humility of atheism is galvanizing. It is a relief that someone has spoken so frankly, with such passion yet such rationality. Now when the subject arises, as it inevitably does, I can simply say: Read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation.