Science After Babel Quotes

“They began with what they needed and purified what they got until they got what they wanted.”
― David Berlinski, Science After Babel

“every natural number beyond 1 is either a prime number or can be written as a product of positive prime numbers: This compelling variety—what is its source?”
― David Berlinski, Science After Babel

“The Austrian monk Gregor Mendel founded the science of genetics on purely a theoretical notion of the gene. In DNA one looks on genetics bare: the ultimate unit of genetic information is the nucleotide. All that makes for difference, and hence for drama, in the natural world, and that is not the product of culture, art, artifice, accident, or hard work, all this, which is brilliantly expressed in perishable flesh, is a matter of an ordering of four biochemical letters along two ropy strands of a single complex molecule.”
― David Berlinski, Science After Babel