Scientist Quotes

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.

I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.

I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight.

I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.

Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open.

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.

The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.

The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.

Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.

Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.

It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment.

Is the human race a universal constructor?

I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more inclined to try to derive an ought from an is, than the population at large.

Humans may or may not have cosmic significance, and if they do, it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic scheme of things.

Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.

You can not define being exactly on time.

Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.

When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.

We are here to make another world.