Science Authors From The United States

"Many religions lay out a set of precepts... and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, the first code of law by Hammurabi of Babylon... was handed to him by the god Marduk... this is a bamboozle... a pious hoax. ...if Hammurabi had merely said, "Here's what I think everybody should do," he would have been much less successful..."

"There is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. ...such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. ...Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious premise of heaven affords."

"Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience... a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? ...So let's call it "theophorin"...What could the selective advantage of theophorin be? ...to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey."

"Now, it is sometimes said that people who take a skeptical approach to UFOs or ancient astronauts or indeed some varieties of revealed religion are engaging in prejudice. I maintain that this is not prejudice. It is postjudice. That is, not a judgement made before examining the evidence but a judgement made after examining the evidence."

"The hope that if they had intervened many times in human history, surely in the present time, a time of great crisis recognized in the 1960s and '70s and manifestly clear today in the age of fifty-five thousand nuclear weapons, that the extraterrestrials would come and prevent us from doing the worst to ourselves. And in that sense I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves."

"If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?"

"The origin of life happened in significantly less than 500 million years. ...Six days was once a popular hypothesis. ...A process that happens quickly is a process that is in some sense likely... this evidence suggests that the origin of life was in some sense easy, in some sense sitting in the laws of physics and chemistry."

"The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life."

"There is a very stunning range of studies... of interstellar organic matter... the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. ...complex organic materials are everywhere."

"The organic molecules found in the gas phase in the atmosphere of Titan by Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft include hydrogen cyanide, cyanoacetylene, butadiene. cyanogen, propylene, propane, acetylene, ethane, ethylene, Methane, likewise. And the principle constituent of the atmosphere, there as here, is molecular nitrogen. It is, I think, very interesting that we have a world in the outer solar system that is loaded with the stuff of life."

"This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story."

"Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them."

"We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system."

"Let's go back to the solar nebula... with the temperature declining the farther we get from the Sun. ...at different distances from the Sun, different materials will condense out, because they have different vapor pressures or different melting points. ...water condenses out roughly at the vicinity of the Earth, whereas silicates condense out closer to the Sun... you have to go out to somewhere near the present distance of Saturn before methane condenses."

"This image of four spectra is taken from one of Huggins's publications. ...You can see that the Comet Winnecke resembles olive oil more than it does Comet Brorsen."

"When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. ...It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ...with trivial exceptions, all organisms on Earth use... an enzyme, to control the rate and direction of the chemistry of life. ...a nucleic acid to encode the hereditary information ...the identical code book for translating nucleic acid language into protein language. ...At the molecular level, we are all virtually identical."

"Suppose your father... walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week."

"Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God."

"Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. ...Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r'2... as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do."

"At birth all of us imagine that we are the universe, and we don't distinguish the boundaries between ourselves and those around us. ...in some social situations, there is the sense that we are central, important. ...there was a natural projection of those attitudes upon the universe."

"Projected upon the natural world... is the idea of privilege. ...Ever since the invention of civilization, there have been privileged classes... some groups that oppress others and that work to maintain these hierarchies of power. The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position."

"The history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance..."

"If I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the laws of nature to be in some intermediate position, that would likely strike you as absurd, as contrary to experience. And yet on the subatomic level, there is a quantization of energy and position and momentum. The reason that it seems counterintuitive is that is that we are not ordinarily down at the level of the very small, where quantum effects dominate."

"The idea that as I walk in this direction my watch goes slightly slower and I am contracted in the direction of motion and my mass has increased slightly does not correspond to everyday experience. ...the reason that it does not correspond to common sense is that we are not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. We may one day be in that habit, and then the Lorentz transformations will be natural, intuitive."

"The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species."

"Science is, at least in part, informed worship."

"If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It... prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intracacy?"

"If we seek... nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception."

"A general problem with much of Western theology... is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less a universe."

"In many myths, the one possibility the gods are most anxious about is that humans will discover some secret of immortality or even... attempt to stride the high heavens. ...It's a little bit like the rich imposing poverty on the poor and then asking to be loved because of it."

"Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small."

"This vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe... has not been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially in no Western religions."

"I stress that the universe is made mostly of nothing, that something is the exception."

"Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth."

"I sit surrounded by cartons of mail from people all over the planet who mourn Carl's loss. Many of them credit him with their awakenings. Some of them say that Carl's example has inspired them to work for science and reason against the forces of superstition and fundamentalism. These thoughts comfort me and lift me up out of my heartache. They allow me to feel, without resorting to the supernatural, that Carl lives."

"Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was true, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other's eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever."

"The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."

"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking."

"Perhaps the most wrenching by-product of the scientific revolution has been to render untenable many of our most cherished and most comforting beliefs. The tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors has been replaced by a cold, immense, indifferent universe in which humans are relegated to obscurity. But I see the emergence in our consciousness of a Universe of a magnificence, and an intricate, elegant order far beyond anything our ancestors imagined. And if much about the Universe can be understood in terms of a few simple laws of Nature, those wishing to believe in God can certainly describe those beautiful eyes to a Reason underpinning all of Nature. My own view is that it is far better to understand the Universe as it really is than to pretend to a Universe as we might wish it to be."

"The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry. No life force, no spirit, no soul seems to be involved. Likewise in neurophysiology: Tentatively, the mind seems to be the expression of the hundred trillion neural connections in the brain, plus a few simple chemicals."

"We—we Americans, we Russians—have spent 43 years and vast national treasure in making ourselves exquisitely vulnerable to instant annihilation. We have done it in the name of patriotism and “national security,” so no one is supposed to question it."

"In both countries, what passes for public debate is still, on closer examination, mainly repetition of national slogans, appeal to popular prejudice, innuendo, self-justification, misdirection, incantation of homilies when evidence is asked for, and a thorough contempt for the intelligence of the citizenry."

"Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism."

"A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable. We are all fallible, even leaders. But however clear it is that criticism is necessary for progress, governments tend to resist."

"The methods and ethos of science and religion are profoundly different. Religion frequently asks us to believe without question, even (or especially) in the absence of hard evidence. Indeed, this is the central meaning of faith. Science asks us to take nothing on faith, to be wary of our penchant for self-deception, to reject anecdotal evidence. Science considers deep skepticism a prime virtue. Religion often sees it as a barrier to enlightenment. So, for centuries, there has been a conflict between the two fields—the discoveries of science challenging religious dogmas, and religion attempting to ignore or suppress the disquieting findings."

"Why is “energy independence” mentioned so often as a justification for environmentally risky nuclear power plants or offshore drilling—but so rarely to justify insulation, efficient cars, or wind and solar energy?"

"If we are to prevent this climactic danger from working its worst, we will simply all have to work together, and for a long time. The principle obstacle is, of course, inertia, resistance to change—huge, worldwide, interlocking industrial, economic, and political establishments all beholden to fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are the problem. In the United States, as the evidence for the seriousness of global warming mounts, the political will to do something about it seems to be shriveling."

"If we keep on with business as usual, the Earth will be warmed more every year; drought and floods both will be endemic; many more cities, provinces, and whole nations will be submerged beneath the waves—unless heroic worldwide engineering countermeasures are taken. In the longer run, still more dire consequences may follow, including the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, its surge into the sea, a major global rise in sea level, and the inundation of almost all the coastal cities on the planet."

"It's hard to understand how “conservatives” could oppose safeguarding the environment—that all of us including conservatives and their children—depend on for our very lives. What exactly is it conservatives are conserving?"

"We are ignorant about the complex mutual dependencies of the beings on earth, and what the sequential consequences will be if we wipe out some especially vulnerable microbes on which larger organisms depend. We are tugging at a planetwide biological tapestry and do not know whether one thread only will come out in our hands, or whether the whole tapestry will unravel before us."