Science Authors From The United States

"As we shall see, when females mate with more than one male, War capers nimbly through the boudoirs, imps of discord frolicking in his wake."

"Boys, I’m afraid the way to a woman’s bed is often through her stomach."

"If a proclivity for promiscuity is genetic, then yes, promiscuous behavior will become more common if loose females tend to have more children than their monogamous peers. That’s how natural selection works."

"I don't expect people to become entomologists or even necessarily to love bugs, but at least to think before reflexively stepping on them. They are just capable of the most amazing things, and many of the things that they do we couldn't survive on this planet without them doing."

"The best thing people can do is to stop assuming that insects don’t belong on this planet and that it’s our job to destroy them. Insects have lived on Earth far longer than humans have, in many more different places, and they’ve found at least a million different ways to make a living here—we’re living on their planet, not the other way around. My hope is not that everyone will become an entomologist but that more people will appreciate insects for their amazing diversity and adaptability."

"Scientific knowledge helps people to understand and appreciate the world and all of its complexities; it’s the best insurance against irrational fear."

"The thrill of the scientific hunt is to have an idea whose truth is hitched to predictions that take us to new places to explore, objects to discover, and data to analyze."

"For thousands of years, mankind considered itself the pinnacle of life’s creation on a planet sitting in the center of the universe. Science changed that perception. Leavitt, Hubble, and others helped us see that we live near the margin of a vast galaxy, in a universe of galaxies, with our planet one of many worlds. Darwin and the biologists had their say too. Our entire species is but one little twig on an enormous tree of life filled with all life on earth. But each discovery that moves us from the center of creation to some obscure corner brings an entirely new relation between us, other species, and the entire universe."

"What do billions of years of history mean for our lives today? Answers to fundamental questions we face—about the inner workings of our organs and our place in nature—will come from understanding how our bodies and minds have emerged from parts common to other living creatures. I can imagine few things more beautiful or intellectually profound than finding the basis for our humanity, and remedies for many of the ills we suffer, nestled inside some of the most humble creatures that have ever lived on our planet."

"Humans are a timekeeping species, and much of our history can be traced to the ways we parse the moments of our lives."

"Do the facts of our ancient history mean that humans are not special or unique among living creatures? Of course not. In fact, knowing something about the deep origins of humanity only adds to the remarkable fact of our existence: all of our extraordinary capabilities arose from basic components that evolved in ancient fish and other creatures. From common parts came a very unique construction. We are not separate from the rest of the living world; we are part of it down to our bones and, as we will see shortly, even our genes."

"Just as Darwin’s theory predicted: at the right time, at the right place, we had found intermediates between two apparently different kinds of animals."

"Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth."

"Everything changes when we look at the evidence; what looks impossible actually happened."

"The order of fossils in the world’s rocks is powerful evidence of our connections to the rest of life."

"Our fish ancestors had internal and external nostrils, too, and to nobody’s surprise these are the same fish that have armbones and other features in common with us."

"I just asked a lot of really stupid questions to a lot of really patient people, and they were amazing. They were so generous with their time and so patient with my dumb questions. That’s how I learned, and I’m totally grateful for them."

"I refuse to give in to despair. I just don’t have time for that. I’m too busy doing science."

"I started my career as an astrophysicist, and then I realized that nowhere else in the universe is as good as here, right? This is the best planet."

"I love this planet, and I’m curious about how it works."

"(- Any tips or words of wisdom for our current and potential new students?) - Take advantage of the city! Moving from the West Coast, I found it hard to adjust to New York. And I won’t defend the weather, the subway, or the smell, but there are so many interesting people here. Go to parties, go see a friend-of-a-friend’s terrible show, say yes to weird things. You never know where life will take you here."

"What a chronicler can do, if not share the pain, is observe and ponder and explicate, and Johnson delivers. He busts myths and clarifies realities about what seems to cause, or to help prevent, cancer."

"Build a quantum computer and problems long dismissed as hopeless would melt away. Imagine tapping a fundamental force of nature, not for the purpose of moving around matter but for moving around numbers—explosions of information. Quantum computing would be to ordinary computing what nuclear energy is to fire."

"I shouldn't be fooled, some of his old colleagues told me, by the newer, mellower Murray. As I explored his past, I found that his reputation as an intellectual show-off was well earned. He had long been interested in almost everything—classical history, archaeology, linguistics, wildlife ecology, ornithology, numismatics, French and Chinese cuisine—and he was always ready to lure people into conversations where he could display the depth of his knowledge and, it sometimes seemed, the shallowness of their own. The breadth of his learning had become legendary."

"George Johnson's Santa Fe office is packed floor to ceiling with century-old electrical paraphernalia — cathode-ray tubes, high-voltage spark coils, glass cylinders of hydrogen and helium, cascades of wires. They're the relics of an eBay odyssey he undertook to re-create a 1909 experiment by Robert Millikan measuring the charge on a single electron."

"While Robert Welch opposed the United Nations for supposedly encouraging obeisance to the one-world conspiracy, McIntire's fundamentalists saw it as a "house of red Babel.""

"Even if you invoke vast geologic time, the series of fortuitous mutations leading to an eye, a kidney, or a brain seem too good to be true."

"When I say things like "I want to build a machine that can be proud of me," that's not just a joke."

"All that we can say, looking at the avocado pit, is that whatever swallowed it must have been big. As big as those fossil skeletons staring out at us from behind the dusty glass of museum cases."

"Doing your own gardening makes you much more aware of food cycles, what it takes to grow it, and what the range of food quality is."

"When it comes to getting away, big pits are a handicap. A quarter-pound seed isn't going to be blown about by anything less than a hurricane, and in water an avocado pit sinks."

"R. N. Shepard [1978] has argued that a number of highly original and significant creations of the human mind have been produced by a mode of thinking which was essentially nonverbal, involving internal representations which could best be described as images of a largely spatial, and often visual character. Shepard provides an impressive list of creative scholars whose most outstanding achievements have been the result of highly visual thinking: Einstein, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, Francis Galton, and Friedrich A. Kekule are on the list as is the mathematician ."

"Nor do such theories provide a ready account for the equivalence of the slopes of the reaction-time functions for the picture-plane and depth pairs. For, in order to explain the dependence of reaction time on angular difference, we must suppose that the features that are being compared are the features of the two-dimensional drawings, which differ more and more with angular departure, and not the features of the three-dimensional objects, which are the same regardless of orientation."

"The subject detects the presence and interrelationships of the basic components of one of the two-dimensional drawings - particularly, the variously oriented straight lines, the several types of vertices by which they are connected and, presumably, something of the structural relationships among these components within the two-dimensional pattern. Then, on the basis of some higher-level processing of these extracted features and their interrelationships, an internal representation, code, or verbal description is generated for each picture separately that captures the intrinsic structure of the three-dimensional object in a form that is independent of the particular orientation in which that object happens to be displayed."

"Most studies employing three-dimensional objects as stimuli have used simultaneous presentation whereas most studies employing two-dimensional objects have used comparison of a single visual stimulus with a memory presentation. We suspect that it is this procedural difference rather than the difference in dimensionality that is the principal determiner of rate of mental rotation."

"The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe - provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three· dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is cancelled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum entropy priors"

"In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues."

"Students of the human mind have long noted its ability to mimic internally the positive notions and transformations of objects in the external world. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the British empiricist David Hume wrote that to "join incongruous shapes and appearances costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects" and that "this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.""

"A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them. To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (i) decays exponentially with this distance, and (ii) does so in accordance with one of two metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along which the stimuli vary. These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms."

"I suggest that the psychophysical function that maps physical parameter space into a species' psychological space has been shaped over evolutionary history so that consequential regions for that species, although variously shaped, are not consistently elongated or flattened in particular directions."

"The system of constraints that governs the projections and transformations of... bodies in space must long ago have become internalized as a powerful, though largely unconscious, part of our perceptual machinery."

"We generalize from one situation to another not because we cannot tell the difference between the two situations but because we judge that they are likely to belong to a set of situations having the same consequence."

"As you become authentically powerful, you become the authority in your life."

"The creation of authentic power requires that you distinguish between your artificial needs and your authentic needs."

"Authentic power is a potential. To bring it into being, you have work to do."

"Creating authentic power transforms you from a victim in your life to a creator of your life."

"Each solstice shows us that we can choose. We cannot stop the winter or the summer from coming. We cannot stop the spring or the fall or make them other than they are. They are gifts from the Universe that we cannot refuse. But we can choose what we will contribute to Life when each arrives."

"Authentic power is the alignment of the personality with the soul."

"Hindu mythology is virtually a large scale projection into the psychological realm of microscopic scientific discoveries. … The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than discovering the endless diversity of nature. They are dancing with Kali, the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."

"The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory."