Seeing Further Quotes

“We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Human memories are short and inaccurate.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“The fact that ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute and distinct categories.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“This process of continual internal state-change is the cogitation that is the raison d’être of the monad and the fundamental process of the universe.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“As the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“To call human beings ‘stewards’ of this planet is like accepting that Jack the Ripper is the right man to start a Home for the Care and Protection of Fallen Women.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Despite the ambiguities I have just confessed to, most of me wants very badly not to die just yet, and I am sure the majority of writers and scientists working in this area agree.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s problems. They are ours.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“I know we’re not the first to discover this,’ Gene Cernan radioed back from about 29,000 kilometres, ‘but we’d like to confirm, from the crew of America, that the world is round.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Instead, we look for patterns in the facts, and some of these patterns we have come to call the laws of Nature, while others have achieved only the status of by-laws.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“Today’s mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“It is entirely possible that some terrestrial microbes are the products of different biogenesis events, in effect ‘alien organisms’, constituting a type of shadow biosphere”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

“It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.”
― Bill Bryson, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society