Popular Science Quotes

I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader's Digest ... I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything. ~ Gary Coleman

Until relatively recently, and with a very few exceptions, cannibalism would have been regarded as anything but normal. As a result, until the last two decades of the 20th century, few scientists spent time studying a topic thought to have little, if any, biological significance. Basically, the party line was that cannibalism, when it did occur, was either the result of starvation to the stresses related to captive conditions. It was as simple as that. Or so we thought. ~ Bill Schutt

Scientists, for their part, need to be far more engaged with current public debates. They "should not be afraid of making their voice heard when the debate wanders into their field of expertise, be it medicine or history. Silence isn't neuatrality; it is supporting the status quo. Of course, it is extremely important to go on doing academic research and to publish the results in scientific journals that only a few experts read. But it is equally important to communicate the latest scientific theories to the general public through popular-science books, and even through the skilful use of art and fiction. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

It is worth noting that a wrong folkoric definition of an Inertial Frame in the Popular Science literature (even in text books) reads that 'it is a frame in uniform motion'. We know very well by now that the idea of motion requires a frame of reference, so that such a definition of an Inertial Frame has no meaning whatsoever, confusing the reader because it tacitly reaffirms the idea of absolute motion
when the goal of every didactic exposition of Relativity Theory should be precisely the opposite. ~ Felix Alba-Juez

I've got a full plate, yes I do. That iPod, that's nice. A phone recorder? Nicely done. All right I'm a bit of a tech geek. I have a subscription to Popular Science and I keep up on all this stuff. ~ Nathan Fillion

At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn. ~ Ian McEwan

The line from psychologists is, if you've seen it before, it hasn't killed you yet. ~ Derek Thompson

Long a topic of interest for history and philosophy of science, the Copernican Revolution more recently has become a favorite symbol for popular science writers. This symbol is used in two main ways, both of which shade easily into the mythic. First, the Copernican Revolution is invoked to mark a point of grand transformation between anthropocentric and objective thinking. Second, many portrayals of the Copernican Revolution heroize its protagonist and ritualize his deed. The Copernican Revolution designates an alleged shift in worldview that took place in the past, but also a sort of personal microcosm of that event - a rite of passage that any mind aspiring to science must undergo. The term "myth" in some usages becomes a near-synonym for pre-Copernican thought - a definition that is maddeningly inadequate even though refreshingly concise. ~ Gregory Schrempp

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone? ~ Walter Isaacson

There is a species of primate in South America more gregarious than most other mammals, with a curious behavior.The members of this species often gather in groups, large and small, and in the course of their mutual chattering , under a wide variety of circumstances, they are induced to engage in bouts of involuntary, convulsive respiration, a sort of loud, helpless, mutually reinforcing group panting that sometimes is so severe as to incapacitate them. Far from being aversive,however, these attacks seem to be sought out by most members of the species, some of whom even appear to be addicted to them.

...the species in Homo sapiens (which does indeed inhabit South America, among other places), and the behavior is laughter. ~ Daniel C. Dennett

If we hadn't broken every single WHO rule many times over, we would never have defeated samllpox. Never. - Arita, leader of smallpox eradication effort ~ Laurie Garrett

The phrase 'popular science' has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific. ~ Maria Mitchell

The human mind is an incredible thing. It can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark. The spark of enquiry and wonder.
Often that spark comes from a teacher. Allow me to explain. I wasn't the easiest person to teach, I was slow to learn to read and my handwriting was untidy. But when I was fourteen my teacher at my school in St Albans, Dikran Tahta, showed me how to harness my energy and encouraged me to think creatively about mathematics. He opened my eyes to maths as the blueprint of the universe itself. If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher. When each of us thinks about what we can do in life, chances are we can do it because of a teacher.
[...] The basis for the future of education must lie in schools and inspiring teachers. But schools can only offer an elementary framework where sometimes rote-learning, equations and examinations can alienate children from science. Most people respond to a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, understanding, without the need for complicated equations. Popular science books and articles can also put across ideas about the way we live. However, only a small percentage of the population read even the most successful books. Science documentaries and films reach a mass audience, but it is only one-way communication. ~ Stephen Hawking

If you were a kid in 1955, you would pick up a copy of 'Popular Science' and it would say, 'This is the kind of car you're going to be driving in five years or in 20 years you'll be able to take a jet plane from New York to London in four hours,' or something like that. We actually got used to the idea that the future's going to be different. ~ David Gerrold

Julia used to say, 'Poor Sebastian. It's something chemical in him.' That was the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. 'There's something chemical between them' was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend. ~ Evelyn Waugh

We encounter, in popular science writing, not a mythologizing of the cosmos as it was perceived by purportedly naive, archaic peoples (an idea that has given rise to countless fables about our intellectual origins), but rather - and this is what makes the venture interesting - an attempt to mythologize the cosmos of matter, that is, the cosmos of de-mythologized, impersonal substance. ~ Gregory Schrempp

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

Silletti and I, for instance, chewed out cotton wads for the same amount of time. I produced .78 milliliters of stimulated saliva; she produced 1.4. She tried to reassure me. "It doesn't say anything about how good you are or how good I am with saliva."
"Erika, I'm a dried up husk."
"Don't say that, Mary. ~ Mary Roach

We had an erector set, and I was an avid fan of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines. ~ James Van Allen

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind. ~ David Gross

Technological innovations do not define a science; they merely prove that medicine is scientific - i.e., ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism. ~ James Cameron

Every single phenomenon in the world, has a physical explanation underneath it. Finding the explanation depends on how far you are willing to go. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I enjoy, and always have enjoyed, disturbing scientists. ~ John Tuzo Wilson

We need to manage holistically, embracing all of our science and traditional knowledge - all sources of knowledge. We can do that from the household to government to international relations. ~ Allan Savory

Embryonic stem-cell research requires the destruction of life to create a stem cell. That's why I think we've got to be very careful in balancing the ethics and the science. ~ George W. Bush

Directing is a big responsibility to take on. I think I'm only good at doing things I know very well. I don't direct movies because I get offered the new vampire movie or science fiction movie. I don't get offered those, anyway, but if I did, I would just tell 'em, "Look, I'm the wrong guy." I only do things about people and situations, and I do the ones that I think I'm the best guy for the job on, which is usually something I generate myself. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

Let the Hunger Games Begin! ~ Suzanne Collins

The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years. ~ Norman Tebbit

Science is public, not private, knowledge. ~ Robert K. Merton

The clarity offered by software as metaphor - and the empowerment allegedly offered to us who know software - should make us pause, because software also engenders a sense of profound ignorance. Software is extremely difficult to comprehend. Who really knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? Who completely understands what one's computer is actually doing at any given moment? Software as a metaphor for metaphor troubles the usual functioning of metaphor, that is, the clarification of an unknown concept through a known one. For, if software illuminates an unknown, it does so through an unknowable (software). This paradox - this drive to grasp what we do not know through what we do not entirely understand… does not undermine, but rather grounds software's appeal. Its combination of what can be seen and not seen, can be known and no known - it's separation of interface from algorithm, of software from hardware - makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture. Every use entails an act of faith. ~ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

God is the fountain of all living waters. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

That's right," Holly had said. "I bet there were, but I bet they didn't work as well as a plastic bag," and then she turned the radio on to NPR, where some popular musician Holly had never heard of was being interviewed at length about his influences, which included, but were not limited to, the sound of ticking clocks and flushing toilets. ~ Laura Kasischke

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read 'The Lost Symbol', by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it. ~ The Economist

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

When I was a boy in Salem, Mass., in the 1950s, if you wanted to buy a book, you had to take a train to Boston. And when you got there, to a bookstore, there was no such thing as a science-fiction section. ~ Gardner Dozois

No." A short, crazed laugh. "Juliette. Please. Please. Don't tell me he's filled your head with romantic notions. Please don't tell me you fell for his false proclamations - ~ Tahereh Mafi

There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and the worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds. But ~ Stephen King

The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in science wanes, the country loses ground to the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Surgical knowledge depends on long practice, not from speculations. ~ Marcello Malpighi

Workable solutions for Earth are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers, or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. ~ Lawrence Anthony

The pathetic thing about it is that many scientists are trying to prove the doctrine of evolution, which no science can do. ~ Robert Andrews Millikan

Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,
I call it Dialectic,
which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are a lot of reasons people don't talk about climate change. One of them has to do with the language of science, and people feeling not competent about this issue. ~ Margaret D. Klein

Life is a chance at Evolution. Overcome yourself and Become. ~ Luis Marques

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice ... incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets. ~ Robertson Davies

Defining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as close and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles. ~ David Blankenhorn

Science have proof that women talk more than men, it's a fact. ~ Deyth Banger

That's the moon, commissioner: hours of boredom followed by a few seconds of terror. ~ David Pedreira

The law of karma says that no matter what context I find myself in, it is neither my parents, nor my science teacher, nor the mailman, but I alone who have brought myself into this state because of my past actions. Instead of trapping me in a fatalistic snare, this gives me freedom. Because I alone have brought myself into my present condition, I myself, by working hard and striving earnestly, can reach the supreme state which is nirvana. ~ Eknath Easwaran

Women have made of themselves such a weapon to act upon the senses that a young man, and even an old man, cannot remain tranquil in their presence. Watch a popular festival, or our receptions or ball-rooms. Woman well knows her influence there. You will see it in her triumphant smiles. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life. ~ Mary Roach

Not every statement by a scientist is a statement of science. ~ John Lennox

Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science. Nature to him was an open book. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone. ~ Albert Einstein

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists was science itself. ~ Jacob Bronowski

It's a red letter day, too: the new set of science textbooks has
finally arrived.
This may not seem much to you but I feel like bringing in
champagne to celebrate or asking the Head for a half day's holiday.
In the past, we have shared one dirty, dog-eared textbook between
two or even three children and it's a book which doesn't even cover
the right topics for our syllabus.
These new ones are written by the people who set the exam, so
they must cover the relevant stuff.
The Head of Department arrives carrying the books and hands
them out to the kids, handling them with great reverence.
'These books are brand new,' he intones solemnly, placing one
neatly on my desk. 'They must be treated with great respect and care
so that others may use them in the future. ~ Frank Chalk

I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art. ~ Richard Rogers