The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2020 Quotes

“Earth changes unimaginably slowly except when it changes suddenly and catastrophically, like right now.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Perhaps the loss of aging will be one more in that series, where, like all the other supercentenarians, we will dance and make love and ski, sharp-eyed, right to the edge of the still inevitable cliff.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Given the issue is so fundamentally important to our view of who we are, a claim that our free will is illusory should be based on fairly direct evidence,” he wrote in a 2004 book. “Such evidence is not available.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Is everything we do determined by the cause-and-effect chain of genes, environment, and the cells that make up our brain, or can we freely form intentions that influence our actions in the world?”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“No aspect of our world is as mysterious as consciousness, the state of awareness that animates our every waking moment, the sense of being located in a body that exists within a larger world of color, sound, and touch, all of it filtered through our thoughts and imbued by emotion.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“I’ve started to interact with geologists around the world, scientists who’ve dedicated their lives to studying glaciers and ice fields, and it’s tough for all of us to realize that we’re studying a system in decline, the demise of the cryosphere, that frozen part of the world.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“He called it a proteinaceous infectious particle, or prion. Prusiner’s paper fared well in peer review, but the editors of Science hesitated for months before publishing it, afraid of a backlash. The idea was outlandish—​but it was also right. Prusiner received a Nobel Prize for his heresy in 1997. Further work by Prusiner and others revealed that prions behave something like the secret weapon from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut imagined a form of water called ice-nine, a “super-crystal” that froze at room temperature and turned any normal water it touched into itself. A single crystal would set off a chain reaction, causing the oceans to ice over, ending all life on Earth.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Once the region’s apex predator, the Asiatic lion almost went extinct during the British empire’s colonization of India, when no viceroy could visit a maharaja’s palace without a hunt in the local forest. Even today, the Asiatic lion still ranks among the rarest of the large feline predators, rarer even than its neighbor to the north, the snow leopard, which is so scarce that a glimpse of one padding down a jagged Himalayan crag is said to consummate a spiritual pilgrimage.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Glaciers used to be fun, even thrilling. It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when geology was much like genetics today, the cutting-edge inquiry that routinely delivered breathtaking insights that captivated the educated world. Many of those insights, starting in the mid-1700s, had to do with the age of the Earth, as people looking closely at rocks found evidence that our planet was a lot older than the 6,000 years suggested by the Old Testament—​perhaps many millions of years older. For this reason, the nineteenth century is said to have discovered “deep time,” the astronomical and geological time scales that reach into pasts so distant that our minds struggle to imagine them.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Nor do we experience the mechanisms that convert our desires into movements. When I wished to begin hiking up the mountain again, I would simply set off, without thinking about the individual muscle contractions that each step required. When a wasp flies, it is probably not aware of its every wing beat. It may simply will itself through space.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Fruit flies have only 250,000 neurons, and they too display complex behaviors. In lab experiments, when faced with dim mating prospects, some seek out alcohol, the consciousness-altering substance that’s available to them in nature in broken-open, fermenting fruit.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Even the deepest point in the ocean is littered with trash: a grocery bag was recently seen drifting along the bottom of the Mariana Trench.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“(In 1972, the seagull was deposed when a conference organizer, unable to check back about what Lorenz wanted to call an upcoming talk, wrote his own title that switched the metaphor to a butterfly.)”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“rust never sleeps,”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020