Science Authors From The United States

"We give antibiotics to most of the meat animals on the planet on most days of their lives — and we don't give them those antibiotics because the animals are sick. We give them because, back in the 1950s, it was discovered that if you give tiny doses of antibiotics to animals — much too small to cure an infection — you will cause them to put on weight faster, which is an economic benefit to the farmer or the producer. And, then, a little while after that, it was discovered that if you gave a slightly larger dose — but still not enough to cure an infection ... what would technically be called a sub-therapeutic dose — you could protect animals from the diseases that spread in crowded barns and feedlots — those barns and feedlots becoming crowded because of this temptation to grow animals faster and faster. So that’s where we are today — all around the world."

"Studies of the quantum properties of black holes by Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein in the 1970s led to the development of the , which makes the maximum amount of that can fit into any volume of space-time proportional to roughly one quarter the area of its . The largest number of informational s a universe of our size can hold is about 10122."

"… The whole expanding universe was described by the equations of general relativity, Einstein's theory of space and time and gravity, but the singularity was the one place where the equations couldn't go. If general relativity provides a map of the universe, the singularity is the uncharted spot that the cartographers aren't sure how to draw. '. Quantum dragons, most likely. The singularity suggested that general relativity would eventually give way to a more fundamental theory, but physicists already knew that Einstein's theory wasn't compatible with quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the behavior of matter at extremely small scales. In their day-to-day lives physicists could ignore the problem by keeping the two theories separate, using general relativity to describe how big things such as planets and galaxies distort spacetime and using quantum mechanics to describe the strange dice game subatomic particles play. But at the end of the day, the separation can't hold up."

"... now I know that physics is about uncovering the reality behind appearances. It's about glimpsing this deep and hidden architecture of existence itself. It's about embracing that the world is not what it seems and that everything is stranger and simpler than we can imagine, and yet comprehensible."

"When I was a small child I longed one day to become so famous that I did not have to hide how odd I was—how unlike other people. Few people really held my attention. It was birds and mammals, reptiles and insects that filled my dreams and eternally whetted my curiosity."

"(excerpt from Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna, pp, 24–25 of 1st edition ((isbn|1426217668}})"

"… most people read for some combination of intellectual enchantment and emotional identification. And the challenge for so many stories around is the emotional identification. How do we find something to engage the reader’s, or viewer’s, emotion in such a way that they stick with us through the technical, didactic parts?"

"Putnam's insight was that quantum theory requires us to conceive of a world in which cognition is an active, participatory process — one that’s not mediated by internal representations. And so that’s what Putnam set out to do. He wanted to create a model of the brain and a philosophy of mind that replaced the old word “observer” with the new word “participator”."

"The s mark where they have been and once one has learned to read sign, as woodsmen and professional ornithologists do, one can study food habits. Meat and fishing-eating birds pass conspicuous white urates, commonly called whitewash, and they regurgitate pellets. The splashes of whitewash under a perch suggest that a bird of prey may have used the perch. s, for example, also pass their urates in the form of whitewash, but if the perch is far from a body of water or from a heron rookery, the whitewash was probably passed by a hawk, an owl or a crow. The whitewash of hawks is rather splashy and falls in spatters and streaks. That of owls is far more solid, chalky in texture and tends to form little heaps. Owls tend to gulp their food in big mouthfuls, swallowing many bones—large and small—along with meat. The bones, only slightly digested, persist in the pellets of adults. One can learn a great deal about what owls have eaten by examining the contents of pellets carefully."

"For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden , unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected. Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support, and few patients’ organizations advocating for them. If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in day care, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym. And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse. They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses — two million annually just in the United States — and cost billions in health care spending, lost wages, and lost national productivity. It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100 trillion and will cause a staggering 10 million deaths per year."

"In the end, I learned two things about the long-term effects of . One is that a child's death is disorienting. The human mind is wired to find patterns and attach meanings, to associate things that are alike, to generalize from one example to another, in short, to make sense of things. Your mind could no more consciously stop doing this than your heart could consciously stop beating. But children's deaths make no sense, have no precedents, are part of no pattern; their deaths are unnatural and wrong. So parents fight their wiring, change their perspectives, and adjust to a reality that makes little sense. The other thing I learned is that letting go of a child is impossible. ..."

"The ’s first image looked like all hell. A month later, in late June 1990, the telescope's political shepherd, , found out what had gone wrong. He called some interested local astronomers—, Don Schneider, and particularly —and since astronomy in Princeton, New Jersey, usually involves food, he invited them to supper at a Route 206 strip-mall Chinese diner. He told them that NASA was about to announce that the telescope's perfect mirror had been ground to the perfectly wrong shape. Jim Gunn, who had designed and overseen the construction of the telescope's principal camera, had also seen the first image and had thought the problem might be fixed. But no, now Bahcall was telling him no, it was the mirror's shape, the telescope couldn't focus, the problem was irrevocable. … NASA, of course, pulled off an ingenious fix, installed by astronauts dangling improbably over the telescope up in space."

"Following the launch of NASA's planet-finding in 2009, the number of possible s quickly multiplied into the thousands — enough to give astronomers their first meaningful statistics on other planetary systems, and to undermine the standard theory for good. Not only were there lots of exoplanet systems bearing no resemblance to ours, but the most commonly observed type of planet — a 'super-Earth' that falls between the sizes of our world and Neptune, which is four times bigger — does not even exist in our Solar System. Using our planetary family as a model, says astronomer of the , “has led to no success in extrapolating what's out there”."

"The fundamental necessity of space security is knowing where every satellite is and how it is behaving. ’s June 2020 doctrine calls this “space domain awareness.” Officially that awareness comes via a global network of sensors on satellites and telescopes on the ground that covers all orbits all the time and tracks everything bigger than 10 centimeters: 3,200 live satellites, as well as 24,000 nonfunctioning “zombies” and pieces of space debris that, in a collision with a satellite at 35,400 kilometers an hour, would cause a catastrophic breakup. The information is sent to Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron at the Combined Space Operations Center at in California. Data on the secret satellites are set aside, and the rest go into a public, free, online catalog called Space-Track, from which “conjunction notifications” are issued when two satellites look like they might get too close."

"... Defense physics is generally ; it solves problems by applying other physicists' more basic work. Its result is usually not knowledge but technology. The adjective applied, when used by physicists, is not a compliment. Academic physics is pure research; its direction is determined by what academics are curious about and can get funding for. It is, of all the sciences, the most fundamental; its questions are about matter's basic nature and the forces that govern the known universe. Moreover, pure research is considered innocent, neither moral nor immoral. Applied research, whose technologies have potential for harm, comes accompanied by difficult moral decisions."

"Of the 100 or so scientists who have served on , Finkbeiner has interviewed 36. A few spoke anonymously, and others refused to talk at all. That reticence is not surprising, given that as much as three-quarters of Jason's work has consisted of classified military projects, some of them morally questionable. Like Errol Morris's film "The Fog of War," in which Robert McNamara painfully revisits Vietnam, Finkbeiner's book shows how even the smartest people with the noblest intentions can end up committing shameful acts."

"We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple s ... will kill people once again. In fact, they already are. People are dying of infections again, because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance."

"This book argues that ... the was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to foster today. It's not just that scientific creativity has produced technological improvements, which in turn have enhanced the prosperity and security of the scientific nations, although that is part of the story, but that the freedoms protected by liberal democracies are essential to facilitating scientific inquiry, and that democracy itself is an experimental system without which neither science nor liberty can flourish."

"The most dramatic burst of biological inventiveness came here, just over half a billion years ago, when a whole array of creatures equipped with claws and teeth and tentacles appeared, in what is aptly called the . Its cause is something of a mystery, but the forms taken on by nearly of the organisms on Earth today represent variations of the plans invented during the Cambrian. It makes you wonder just how exotic might be."

"In all, Kepler tested seventy circular orbits against 's Mars data, all to no avail. At one point, performing a leap of the imagination like Leonardo's to the moon, he imagined himself on Mars, and sought to reconstruct the path the earths motion would trace out across the skies of a Martian observatory; this effort consumed nine hundred pages of calculations, but still failed to solve the major problem."

"Neuroscience has begun to reveal some fascinating things about how the brain works, shedding light on the concept of personal identity, the data-handling limitations of the central nervous system, and the way that the brain smooths over its liabilities and discontinuities to sustain a sense of unified consciousness. We are beginning to realize that each of us really does contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it, and that the chorus of voices within was built up over eons of evolution, like geological strata in the or the ."

"… For more than a thousand years it was thought that the heavens obeyed a different physics than pertains here on Earth. With the scientific renaissance that culminated in Isaac Newton’s work it became clear that, on the contrary, the same natural laws rule the earth and the sky. The cosmos came to be viewed as a marvel, events following from causes like the tickings of brass cogs. The realm of the inexplicable—where dwell the gods of those dazzled by the unexplained—was thereafter relegated to the first moment of time, when the universe somehow blossomed into being. Then quantum chance reared its indeterminate face, as a creative agency that authored the first phenomena of cosmic time. So we are obliged to consider that even the largest systems are ruled by quantum precepts that govern nature on the smallest scales, and that the origin of the universe may itself have been a cosmic flux."

"One of the first scientific concepts taught to children is the idea that matter can be a solid, liquid, or gas. Indeed, if you were to ask most American adults how many there are, the most likely answer you would get is three. It would not be unreasonable to consider this to be common knowledge. Yet the scientifically savvy know of far more phases of matter than the familiar three. is another, as is . And there are many more that exist at extreme temperatures or pressures. Change the conditions under which matter finds itself, and it will act in unexpected ways."

"Two well-regarded measurements for the expansion rate of the universe disagree, leaving cosmologists very puzzled. It may be that something large has been overlooked in our theory of the . This discrepancy is called the and it has led to a very interesting conversation within the cosmology community."

"One very interesting idea is that when we get to the smallest size of all, we don't find a particle, but rather an ultra-tiny vibrating string."

"I'm not personally a fan of the idea of SUSY and I never have been. But it's possible and we should continue to look for it. For one thing, if supersymmetry is false, then superstring theory is false. I don't believe in superstring theory either, but I like it. I kind of hope it's right. But hope isn't good enough in science."

"The history of can be considered nothing less than a huge triumph for science. Over the course of a little more than a century of effort, our understanding of the world of atomic and subatomic physics went from a vague understanding of atoms, to one that is much more detailed. Early in this hundred-year-long period, we learned about electrons (1897), then how they circle a dense nucleus (1911), followed by the discovery of the s (1917) and s (1932) that form the nucleus. From the 1930s onward, researchers used both cosmic rays and particle accelerators to discover antimatter (1932), and particles that don’t exist in atoms (e.g., the [1936] and [1956], as well as a huge number of others)."

"It is indeed like that, how often we are held by prejudice, so that we either do not admit what is before our eyes or bow as much as possible to a preconceived opinion because of the perverse wont of human nature. Nor do I except myself from that weakness."

"Because we humans don’t notice changes that take place slowly, incrementally, we tend to underestimate their cumulative effects, even within the span of one or two lifetimes."

"Whatever gravity was, it must work, because he (Galileo) had the math to prove it."

"To a layperson, this ebb and flow of scientific opinion, the flipflop of theory over time, the occasionally fierce and public disagreements between viewpoints, is as mystifying as it is frustrating… This isn’t a sign of science’s weakness, though, but rather its strength, always testing assumptions, making challenges, drawing new conclusions based on the latest evidence. It may err too far in one direction, then too far in the other, correcting as it goes, but every step eventually brings us all a little closer to the truth."

"Stone makes a statement as true today as it was then, the reason why conservationists can never let down their guard: “As one menace is disposed of, another seems inevitably to develop.”"

"Natural systems are like those hollow Russian dolls, layer nested within layer within layer, always hiding a new riddle beneath the last one. Figuring out how they work as a herculean task, one with which humans have been grappling for a relatively short time. If you want clear-cut problems and need solutions, try geometry. This is ecology and it doesn’t get any more complex and messier than this. But we’re learning."

"Once, when his wife suggested that he attend church on Sunday for the sake of the children, Hale answered, “My creed is truth, wherever it may lead, and I believe that no creed is finer than this (the 100-inch telescope).”"

"You won’t find the cerulean warbler on the federal Endangered Species list; it is not so far gone as to rate that kind of last-gasp governmental life support, which is usually withheld until it is too late to do much good."

"Scientists have called the arc of maritime live oak and pine that once rimmed the Gulf from east Texas to west Florida the most important migratory stopover area in North America, but it has been fractured into pathetic slivers—consumed by vacation home developments, grazing cattle, strip malls, and, most recently, even an explosion of casino construction. Further inland, the rich, diverse forests of longleaf pine and hardwoods that once supplied the birds with food before the next leg of their journey north or being clear-cut, the trees being ground into wood pulp by portable “chipping mills.” Elsewhere, the land is replanted with a sterile monoculture of fast-growing junk pine that offers little in the way of sustenance to a weary migrant."

"It is a prairie’s gentle deceit that you think you see everything there is in a single, sweeping glance, when in fact you see very little at all, even if you spend a lifetime looking."

"Some of these observations of “prairie pigeons” were made incidental to blasting them out of the sky; curlews, golden-plovers, godwits, and other shorebirds were treated much as passenger pigeons back East had been, with no-holds-barred slaughter. There are a number of accounts of gunners filling wagon beds with heaps of dead birds—then dumping the birds out to rot and filling the wagons all over again because the shooting was too good to stop."

"Of course, for environmental havoc, no organism can quite compare to humans."

"The universe is a work in progress."

"—A Manx shearwater, a small, stocky seabird resembling a gull, was taken from its nest burrow on Skokholm, off Wales, and moved to Boston. It completed the trip home in just twelve days—one day faster than the airmail letter sent from the United States confirming the bird’s release."

"Birds are metabolic dynamos, requiring food at regular intervals and in significant amounts; few old sayings are as completely false as to claim that a finicky person “eats like like a bird.” If I ate, by proportion, the same amount as a chickadee, I would have to consume about fifty pounds of camarones every day, and even raptors, with their somewhat slower metabolism, must eat about 10 percent of their weight to stay alive."

"Mexico affords legal protection to raptors, but it is a paper law only, poorly enforced and widely ignored in the field."

"Think like a scientist: treat your opinions as hypotheses and decisions as experiments."

"Authenticity without boundaries is careless. Authenticity without empathy is selfish."

"Embrace confident humility: argue like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong."

"If you've ever had a boss who one day had your back and then the next day stabbed you in the back, or vice versa, that's a lot more stressful if we look at the research, than just having the boss who you knew was gonna stab you in the back."

"Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate. You reciprocate a favor by paying it back. You honor an act of kindness by paying it forward."

"Young kids have wider circles of concern than adults. Adults expect people to enjoy the misfortune of groups they dislike. But 3-5-year-olds expect people to care about everyone's suffering. Compassion is an instinct—we don't have to learn it. We need to stop unlearning it."

"Time doesn't heal psychological wounds. Perspective does...Time creates distance. Reflection offers wisdom."