Scientists tracking mirror neurons noticed that a monkey will get excited not just when holding a banana, but also when seeing someone else holding a banana.
We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.
Faith gives the courage to live and do. Scientists, with their disciplined thinking, like others, need a basis for the good life, for aspiration, for courage to do great deeds. They need a faith to live by. The hope of the world lies in those who have such faith and who use the methods of science to make their visions become real. Visions and hope and faith are not part of science. They are beyond the nature that science knows. Of such is the religion that gives meaning to life.
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
Scientists constantly get clobbered with the idea that we spent 27 billion dollars on the Apollo programs, and are asked "What more do you want?" We didn't spend it; it was done for political reasons. . . . Apollo was a response to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and to the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin. President Kennedy's objective was not to find out the origin of the moon by the end of the decade; rather it was to put a man on the moon and bring him back, and we did that.
I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.
The ideas of theologians are refuted by their adversaries, the ideas of scientists are refuted by their followers.
The book is a dialogue between The Dalai Lama and a group of scientists about how we can better handle our destructive emotions and how to overcome them.
That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.
Scientists don't believe anything. Scientists test things.
Even brilliant scientists Google themselves.
But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.
The earth is round, smoking is linked to lung cancer, gravity makes things fall, and humans are warming the planet. Scientists strongly agree on all of these.
I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.
The best scientists that I've met are those that are humanists and scientists at the same time.
If you have bought one of those T-shirts with Maxwell's equations on the front, you may have to worry about its going out of style, but not about its becoming false. We will go on teaching Maxwellian electrodynamics as long as there are scientists.
If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality.
Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.
Scientists are a bunch of romantics.
Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving: most of the scientists I spoke with assume we'll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.