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41 " Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one. "
― Judy Melinek , Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner
42 " Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered. "
― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country
43 " I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. "
― Douglas Adams , The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1-5)
44 " You don't need to be a scientist to know how powerful your imagination is. "
― , Be Who You Want, Have What You Want: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
45 " Dalai Lama: " If a scientist confirm nonexistence of something we believe, then we have to accept that." Dan Harris: " So if scientists come up with something that contradicts your beliefs, you will change your beliefs?" Dalai Lama: " Oh yes. Yes. "
46 " It is a meaningful thing for a scientist of the stature of Ibn Sina, certainly one of the best scientific minds in the whole history of mankind, to often resort to prayer to seek God's help in solving his philosophical and scientific problems. And it is also perfectly understandable why the purification of the soul is considered an integral part of the methodology of knowledge. "
― Osman Bakar , Tawhid and Science
47 " So how does one go about proving something like this? It's not like being a lawyer, where the goal is to persuade other people; nor is it like a scientist testing a theory. This is a unique art form within the world of rational science. We are trying to craft a " poem of reason" that explains fully and clearly and satisfies the pickiest demands of logic, while at the same time giving us goosebumps. "
48 " Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. "
― Vladimir Nabokov , Lolita
49 " They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they’re almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa’s immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta’s chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. "
― Rebecca Skloot , The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
50 " The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained. "
― Richard P. Feynman
51 " An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it it is reasonably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him; but that would be just like an oyster, which is the most conceited animal there is, except man. And anyway, this one could not know, at that early date, that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more in the scheme yet. "
― Mark Twain , Tom Sawyer, Detective
52 " Devil-boy Jack: " A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back." Thaniel Fox: " There is no higher power, Devil-boy! And I am no-one's pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of." Devil-boy Jack: " I do not speak of entities. I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of us. It is a way. It is the way. "
53 " Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and... "
― Jennifer Egan , A Visit from the Goon Squad
54 " You going to be a scientist when you grow up?” That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got. "
― Philip Pullman , The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)
55 " I am proud to say to you that, I am a scientist and I accept all religions to be biologically true and equal. My pursuit of understanding the human mind has taught me universal tolerance. "
― Abhijit Naskar , Biopsy of Religions: Neuroanalysis Towards Universal Tolerance
56 " Science could potentially do a better job explaining the meaning of life if scientists devise experiments that can weed out the best answers from the worst. The principle difference between religion and science is as follows: the religious make stuff up to explain what they don't understand. Scientists do the same, but scientists run their ideas through a very rigorous filter that consists of logic, experimentation and peer review. Such a filter eliminates the worst ideas and preserves the best.So if a scientist answers the question, " What is the meaning of life," his answer, at the very worst, is no less valid than an answer that comes from the highest witchdoctor or priest. "
57 " The word 'proof' should strictly only be used when we are dealing with deductive inferences.... Popper claimed that scientists only need to use deductive inferences.... So if a scientist is only interested in demonstrating that a given theory is false, she may be able to accomplish her goal without the use of inductive inferences.... When a scientist collects experimental data, her aim might be to show that a particular theory...is false. She will have to resort to inductive reasoning.... So Popper's attempt to show that science can get by without induction does not succeed. "
― Samir Okasha , Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction
58 " Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist. "
59 " You can FEEL the wave of emotion online when something is about to go viral, good or bad. A scientist I met once mathematically compared internet behavior to swarm behavior seen in starlings or locusts. "
― Felicia Day , You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)
60 " Think of a " discovery" as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time. The discovery's value does not equal the value of the information discovered but rather the value of having the information available earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much benefited the world [unless having a solution even slightly sooner is immensely valuable or enables further important and urgent work]. "