Eavesdroppings

Speaking of Science

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Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.

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Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
—Mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot (Born Nov. 20, 1924; died Oct. 14, 2010)


It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.
—Columbia University mechanical engineer James Hone, describing the properties of the material discovered by 2010 Nobelists Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim


In a way the impact of biology has had a curious set-back as a result of the magnificent victories of molecular biology....We will have to make a double effort to restore the influence of organismic biology and to make better known the evolutionary trends that culminated in that unique psycho-social organism Man.
Ernst Mayr to Julian Huxley, October 1967,...


The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.
—Researcher/physician John Ioannidis, quoted in an Atlantic Monthly profile, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science” (Nov. 2010)


Most psychology departments, when we get near them, are not science departments....They don’t want to really measure intelligence because they don’t want intelligence to be something you are born with as opposed to having it been largely determined by how you grow up....Political correctness has never been a way to move toward the truth.
James Watson, in a BigThink.com video interview


Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, as reported by TechCrunch (Aug. 4, 2010)

Send us timely and interesting quotes, along with context, to quotes@the-scientist.com.

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