#at

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#metaphor #science #sea-lion #snail #systems-analyst

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. ↗

— Thomas Huxley

#accurate #best #common #common sense #fallacy

I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical; it's a song. ↗

— David Byrne

#poetry #song #design

If you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're gonna get an answer to some deep philosophical question...you may be wrong! It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But my interest in science is to simply find out about the world. ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#nature

Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth. ↗

— Jules Verne

#facts #knowledge #science #scientific-method #truth

Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness. ↗

— Thomas Bartholin

#nature

What do you think science is? There's nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. Which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic? ↗

— Steven Novella

#science #science-vs-religion #skeptics-guide-to-the-universe #nature

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#lies #mouth #native-tongue #remembered #speak

Imagine you are Siri Keeton: You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath. Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire. ↗

— Peter Watts

#science-fiction #space-travel #vampires #imagination

One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#eternity #future #mathematics #physics #politics