Eavesdroppings
Science Quotations of the Month
“It’s still acceptable in [the UK] for people to say, almost as an aside, while drinking their claret, ‘Of course, I don’t understand science, I did classics.’ You’re not considered to be a philistine....But [this] should be like driving around without a seatbelt….It should become just an unacceptable thing to do.”
—Brian Cox, physicist, pop musician, and TV presenter of “Wonders of the Solar System”
“We laid the ground rules—that any research we did, we would have to take total control of the data, transparency and the freedom to make those data available to other scientists and subject to peer review. They left and we never heard back from them.”
—Bob Shipp of the University of South Alabama, whose marine science department was being considered by BP to work on a restoration plan after the Gulf of Mexico...
“When the mantle of the squid was opened for maturity assessment, we witnessed an unusual event.”
—Deep-water fisheries expert Dr Alexander Arkhipkin of the Falkland Islands Government Fisheries Department explaining his discovery that deep-sea squid have penises that, when erect, are nearly the length of the entire animal.
“If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter”
—Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead
“What I’m trying to do is get media and the political world to stop framing climate change in ‘either/or’ terms, when we’re really looking at a bell curve of possibilities. It’s like buying insurance.”
“The biggest oxymoron in science is this dangerously wrong-headed phrase: exact science.”
—Renowned climatologist Stephen Schneider in his last interview, in Stanford Magazine, before dying in July at age 65 of a heart attack.