Quotes

The more your ideas are untestable, either in principle or in practice, the less useful they are to the advance of science.

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination.

Science is something to be proud of, it allows us to understand the world in spite of ourselves.

What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind "through the universe"? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day.

I am proud to be part of a species where a subset of its members willingly put their lives at risk to push the boundaries of our existence.

One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

When your reasons for believing something are justified ad hoc, you are left susceptible to further discoveries undermining the rationale for that belief.

If that's how you wanna invoke your evidence for god, then god is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance, thats getting smaller, smaller and smaller as time goes on.

Ever since there have been people, there have been explorers, looking in places where other hadn't been before. Not everyone does it, but we are part of a species where some members of the species do, to the benefit of us all.

[on what his favorite sci-fi movies are] - Deep Impact (1998) and Contact (1997). They spent a lot of time getting the science right. I'm on a crusade to get movie directors to get their science right because, more often than they believe, the science is more extraordinary than anything they can invent.

I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know.

[A]s they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion. ... Although just as in hostage negotiations, it's probably best to keep both sides talking to each other.

Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have been famously wrong.

We should not be ashamed of not having answers to all questions yet. ... I'm perfectly happy staring somebody in the face saying, 'I don't know yet, and we've got top people working on it.' The moment you feel compelled to provide an answer, then you're doing the same thing that the religious community does: providing answers to every possible question.

I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me they've got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. Because that's when we're going to fight.

So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going.

[Regarding Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)] - They all knew the mother-ship was coming, they all knew it was a flying saucer, they all knew it came from another planet through the vacuum of space. And so what do they do, to the left of that monument? They set up runway lights. And I'm thinking, if you could travel through the vacuum of space, you don't need runway lights. Runway lights are if you're using air for lift. Aliens would not need air for lift.

Emotional truths woven by lawyers in the court of law are apparently more important than the truths of actual events. I have grown to fear for those whose innocence became trapped within the legal system.

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting.

[T]he persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what's going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense.

Another practice that isn't science is embracing ignorance. Yet it's fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is ... So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.

This present-day version of God of the gaps goes by a fresh name: intelligent design. ... Instead, why not tally all those things whose design ... reflect[s] the absence of intelligence?

[on if religion and science have an inherent conflict between them] - Most religious people in America, fully embrace science. So the argument that religion has some issue with science applies to a small fraction of those who declare that they are religious. They just happen to be a very vocal fraction so you got the impression that there are more of them than there actually is.

It's actually the minority of religious people who rejects science or feel threatened by it or want to sort of undo or restrict where science can go. The rest, you know, are just fine with science. And has been that way ever since the beginning. And by the way, there's no tradition of scientists knocking down the door, the Sunday school door, telling the preacher what to teach. There's no tradition of scientists picketing outside of churches nor should there be some [emergent] tradition of religious fundamentalists trying to change the curriculum in the science classroom. There's been a happy coexistence for centuries.

And for that to change now would be unfortunate. Because I've seen this happen in other nations and the other states where the consequences are that you just basically recede back to the cave because that's where you land when you undermine the scientific and technological innovations that come about when you're a properly trained scientist or technologist. Consider also that in America, 40% of American scientists are religious. So this notion that there's some... that if you're a scientist, you're an atheist or if you're religious, you're not a scientist, that's just empirically false. It's an empirically false statement.

And what I mean by religious is that you can pose the question in a way that is unambiguous. You don't ask, well, do you go to church every Sunday 'cause plenty of people go to church, like, just for the pie, you know, or the social scene after the service. You ask people, do you pray to [a person or] God. If you say yes to that, you're religious by, presumably, anybody's standards of your conduct. And it's the yes to that question that applies to 40% of scientists. So, there're plenty of atheists who are scientists or not scientists. There maybe a conflict but many people in this country coexist in both worlds.

My great fear is that we've in fact been visited by intelligent aliens, but they chose not to make contact, on the conclusion that there's no sign of intelligent life on earth. We were sending signals out before we were doing it on purpose. Our early TV shows like 'I Love Lucy' and 'The Honeymooners' and that sort of thing - 'Howdy Doody'. These are our cultural emissaries.

If I went around always calling myself "doctor," that would mean you'd have to believe what I said because of my authority. But, in fact, if what I say is fundamentally true, and you understand why it's true, you never have to reference title again.