Best years-ago & science Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“No scientist or student of science, need ever read an original work of the past. As a general rule, he does not think of doing so. Rutherford was one of the greatest experimental physicists, but no nuclear scientist today would study his researches of fifty years ago. Their substance has all been infused into the common agreement, the textbooks, the contemporary papers, the living present.”

Thinking Needs Years Doe Today Past Science Common Study Students Paper Research Years Ago Scientist Originals Nuclear Contemporary Substance Fifty Agreement Papers Physicist Textbooks

Author:C.P. Snow

“But as no two (theoreticians) agree on this (skin friction) or any other subject, some not agreeing today with what they wrote a year ago, I think we might put down all their results, add them together, and then divide by the number of mathematicians, and thus find the average coefficient of error. (1908)”

Thinking Years Two Might Today Together Science Results Numbers Subjects Years Ago Skins Agree Add Errors Average Divides Mathematician Friction

Author:Hiram Maxim

“This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.”

Source: Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

“Dogbert gazing at night sky No matter how bad the day is, the stars are always there. Dilbert Actually, many of them burned out years ago, but their light is just now reaching earth. DogbertThank you for shattering my comfortable misconception. DilbertIt's the miracle of science.”

Years Matter Light Earth Science Night Stars Sky Comfortable Years Ago Accounts Miracle Reaching Burned Misconception Night Sky Gazing Shattering Burned Out Dilbert

Author:Scott Adams

“Mr. Hillaire Belloc has pointed out that science has changed greatly, and for the worse, since it became popular. Some hundred years ago, or more, only very unusual, highly original spirits were attracted to science at all; scientific work was therefore carried out by men of exceptional intelligence. Now, scientists are turned out by mass production in our universities.”

Men Years Science Spirit Change Changed Mass Hundred Years Ago Scientist Originals University Productions Unusual Exceptional Mass Production

Author:Anthony Standen

“Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.”

Years Has Beens Today Science Fiction Years Ago Science Fiction Technique Forty

Author:Tony Visconti

“I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.”

People Thinking Years Wells Reason Science Years Ago Complicated

Author:James D. Watson

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

World Years Mind Firsts Reason Eye Age Lasts Science Intellectual Years Ago Visible Magician Inheritance Newton Great Minds Age Of Reason Sumerians

Book:The Essential Keynes

Source: The Essential Keynes

“People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.”

People Should Years Believe Earth America Science Years Ago Errors Billions Scales Yards North America Width

Author:Richard Dawkins

“I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.”

Way Years Stills Science Process Nature Happened Events Creation Evolution Years Ago Method Billions Creationist Nothing Makes Sense

Author:Theodosius Dobzhansky

“If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men.”

Ifs Men Want Years Done Science Millions Air Evolution Ocean Bird Years Ago Fishes Flight Swim Harvard Germs Mammals Reptiles

Author:George Wald

“If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star ... They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.”

Ifs Years Made Bigs Would Be Science Culture Universe Stars Common Share Planets Future Years Ago Intelligent Mathematics Billions Contact Aliens Atoms Bangs Living On Common Culture

Author:Martin Rees

“About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”

Ifs Men Should Years Wells Might Remember Science Views Theory Ought Years Ago Rate Observation Odd Thirty Colour Pits Thirty Years Pebbles Gravel Geologist

Book:On the Origin of Species

Source: On the Origin of Species

“I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.”

“Medicine has made all its progress during the past fifty years. ... How many operations that are now in use were known fifty years ago?-they were not operations, they were executions.”

Years Made Use Past Science Known Progress Years Ago Medicine Operations Fifty Execution

Author:Mark Twain

“Sarcastic Science, she would like to know, In her complacent ministry of fear, How we propose to get away from here When she has made things so we have to go Or be wiped out. Will she be asked to show Us how by rocket we may hope to steer To some star off there, say, a half light-year Through temperature of absolute zero? Why wait for Science to supply the how When any amateur can tell it now? The way to go away should be the same As fifty million years ago we came- If anyone remembers how that was I have a theory, but it hardly does.”

“The weeds of a seemingly learned and brilliant but actually trivial and empty philosophy of Nature which, after having been replaced some 50 years ago by the exact sciences, is now once more dug up by pseudo scientists from the lumber room of human fallacies, and like a trollop, newly attired in elegant dress and make-up, is smuggled into respectable company, to which she does not belong.”

Years Humans Doe Philosophy Science Nature Natural Rooms Company Years Ago Empty Scientist Accounts Dresses Brilliant Weed Replaced Elegant Respectable Fallacy Pseudo Exact Sciences Lumber

Author:Hermann Kolbe

“About two million years ago, man appeared. He has become the dominant species on the earth. All other living things, animal and plant, live by his sufferance. He is the custodian of life on earth, and in the solar system. It's a big responsibility.”

Men Life Years Two Bigs Earth Science Animal Responsibility Millions Years Ago Plant Species Live By Dominant Living Things Solar System Custodians Big Responsibility

Author:George Wald

“If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.”

Ifs World Way Years Today Science Views Return Years Ago Mathematics Intuition Physics Experiments Mathematical Consistent Mystical Precision Sophistication World View

Author:Fritjof Capra

“X-rays ... I am afraid of them. I stopped experimenting with them two years ago, when I came near to losing my eyesight and Dally, my assistant practically lost the use of both of his arms.”

Years Two Use Science Lost Arms Losing Years Ago Experiments Two Years Rays Assistants Eyesight Two Years Ago

Author:Thomas A. Edison

“If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of fifty years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in touch with nature more than science. ... Too few natural areas remain; both by intent and by indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us.”

Ifs Years Science Nature Natural Careers Environment Areas Years Ago Indifference Fifty Wilderness Adulthood Biographies Entering

Author:Charles Lindbergh

“A life that stood out as a gospel of self-forgetting service. He could have added fortune to fame but caring for neither he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world. The centre of his world was the south where he was born in slavery some 79 years ago and where he did his work as a creative scientist.”

World Years Self Science Found Born Forget Creative Birth Honor Fame Research Years Ago Scientist Slavery Fortune South Caring Helpful Centre Found Happiness

Author:George Washington Carver

“Only about seventy years ago was chemistry, like a grain of seed from a ripe fruit, separated from the other physical sciences. With Black, Cavendish and Priestley, its new era began. Medicine, pharmacy, and the useful arts, had prepared the soil upon which this seed was to germinate and to flourish.”

Source: Familiar Letters on Chemistry, in its relation to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce and Political Economy: Edited by John Blyth

“Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.”

“I tell [medical students] that they are the luckiest persons on earth to be in medical school, and to forget all this worry about H.M.O.'s and keep your eye on helping the patient. It's the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a couple of years ago.”

Years Persons Helping Eye School Earth Science Forget Worry Conditions Students Couple Years Ago Doctors Treats Luck Patient Medical Heal Best Times Medical School

Author:Joseph Murray

“I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the ordinary things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep - great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth’s magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.”

“An announcement of [Christopher] Zeeman's lecture at Northwestern University in the spring of 1977 contains a quote describing catastrophe theory as the most important development in mathematics since the invention of calculus 300 years ago.”

Years Important Science Theory Development Spring Years Ago Mathematics University Invention Catastrophe Lectures Describing Calculus Announcements Northwestern Northwestern University

Book:The Collected Papers of Stephen Smale

Source: The Collected Papers of Stephen Smale

“If a little less time was devoted to the translation of letters by Julius Caesar describing Britain 2000 years ago and a little more time was spent on teaching children how to describe (in simple modern English) the method whereby ethylene was converted into polythene in 1933 in the ICI laboratories at Northwich, and to discussing the enormous social changes which have resulted from this discovery, then I believe that we should be training future leaders in this country to face the world of tomorrow far more effectively than we are at the present time.”

“We might expect intelligent life and technological communities to have emerged in the universe billions of years ago. Given that human society is only a few thousand years old, and that human technological society is mere centuries old, the nature of a community with millions or even billions of years of technological and social progress cannot even be imagined. ... What would we make of a billion-year-old technological community?”

“When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.”

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