It - Quotes
It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don't, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival.
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Sometimes it’s easier to pretend that something is not happening rather than deal with it.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part - perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school - and you think I'm going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No, you are not going to be able understand it. [...] You see my physics students don't understand it either. That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.
Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens - not once in a trillion copyings - but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents - things that almost never happen - and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents - which happens automatically when you have replication and competition - and you get evolution.
A graveyard could be so densely populated and yet it was the loneliest place on Earth.
All of us lie in some way. It is a precondition for society to function, that we lie a little bit. You can view it as a form of consideration. The truth is, in a way, very self-centred.