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Category: science
Quotes of Category: science
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  1. Terry Pratchett _ Men at Arms

    It was a large room, heavily outfitted with the usual badly ventilated furnaces, rows of bubbling crucibles, and one stuffed alligator. Things floated in jars. The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.
    book-quotescience

  2. Terry Pratchett _ Lords and Ladies

    It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was succesfully demonstrated to be made up of /resons/ {Lit.: 'Thing-ies'} or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five 'flavours', known as 'up', 'down', 'sideways', 'sex appeal' and 'peppermint'.
    book-quotesciencequarks

  3. Terry Pratchett

    Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came to being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old.These dates are incorrect.Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508BC.These suggestions are also incorrect.Archbishop James Usher {1580-1656} published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh
    scienceuniversecreationgenesis

  4. Terry Pratchett _ Wintersmith

    That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?
    book-quotescienceimaginationhumor

  5. Terry Pratchett _ A Slip of the Keyboard:

    You want fantasy? Here's one... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds. And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life.
    book-quotescienceuniversehumour

  6. Terry Pratchett _ Feet of Clay

    People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
    book-quotescience

  7. Terry Pratchett _ Lords and Ladies

    In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
    book-quotesciencemetaphysicsphysics

  8. Terry Pratchett _ Small Gods

    Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.
    book-quotescience

  9. Michael Pollan _ How to Change Your Mind: What

    The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant-commandeering its body, making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain in order to disseminate its genes-it occurred to me that Stamets and that poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven't killed him, it's true, and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it's also true that this man's life-his brain!-has been utterly taken over by fungi; he has dedicated himself to their cause, speaking for the mushrooms in the same way that Dr. Seuss's Lorax speaks for the trees. He disseminates fungal spores far and wide, helping them, whether by mail order or sheer dint of his enthusiasm, to vastly expand their range and spread their message.
    book-quotesciencebraincordyceps

  10. Michael Pollan _ How to Change Your Mind: What

    So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when "all mean egotism vanishes." Wonders {and terrors} we're ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between self and world, that no-man's-land which in ordinary hours the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more connected, "part and particle" of some larger entity. Whether we call that entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. But it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.
    book-quotesciencepsychologyspiritual

  11. Michael Pollan _ How to Change Your Mind: What

    Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn't seem out of place on a Hallmark card flow with the force of revealed truth.Love is everything.Okay, but what else did you learn?No - you must not have heard me; it's everything!Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To resaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight.
    book-quotesciencepsychedelics

  12. Michael Pollan _ The Botany of Desire: A

    Eventually the potato's undeniable advantages over grain would convert all of northern Europe, but outside of Ireland the process was never anything less than a struggle. ... Louis {XVI} hatched an ingenious promotional scheme. He ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly convinced of the crop's value, made off in the night with the royal tubers.
    book-quotescienceplant
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