Earth to Class

[Suggested by Ellen Mandel, NYC Schools, Brooklyn]

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky, The American biology Teacher (1973)

“The value and utility of an experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used.”

Gregor Mendel, Experiments in Plant Hybridization (1865)

“Science can only state what is, not what should be.”

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (1950)

“We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA).”

J.D. Watson and F.H.C. Crick, Nature (1953)

“I finished your book yesterday . . As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the stake if requisite . . . I am sharpening my claws and beak in readiness.”

Thomas Henry Huxley in a letter to Charles Darwin, November 23, 1859

“Today, June 6, 2000, marks a historic point in the 100,000-year record of humanity.”

Craig Venter, announcing completion of the rough sequence of the human genome

“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Louis Pasteur, in a lecture at the University of Lille (1854)

“Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question ‘How?’ but gets terribly confused when you ask the question ‘Why’”

Erwin Chargaff, Columbia Forum, Summer 1969

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, The Scientist Speculates (1962)

“. . . to a scientist, nothing is more different than writing fiction. Fiction is where you can supposedly invent anything; as a scientist, you are not supposed to make up anything.”

Carl Djerassi, reproductive biologist and writer of fiction, in an interview (1995)

“Favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed . . . The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.”
Charles Darwin, in his autobiography

“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.”

Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949)

"There are two possible outcomes: If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."
Enrico Fermi

“I know not what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

~ Isaac Newton

“Great Scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.”

~Aldous Huxley (1964)

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

~ Albert Einstein

“But the great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact …”

~Thomas Henry Huxley

“In the fields of observation chance favors the prepared mind.”

~ Louis Pasteur

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

~ Niels Bohr

“An experiment is a question which science poses to nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.”

~Max Planck (1949)

“No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example.”

~ Unknown

“The purpose of models is not to fit the data, but to sharpen the questions.”

~Samuel Karlin (1983)

And finally a bizarre statement I came across on an internet science discussion forum. Somebody was arguing that the conservation laws disprove the Big Bang and made this statement:

“I am interested in the 'nature of the universe' not its irrelevant parts such as chemistry.”

~ comment made on internet discussion forum

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
– Emerson

There is nothing colder than chemistry
- Anita Loos (filmmaker)

If it’s green, its biology. If it stinks, it’s chemistry. If it has numbers, it’s math. If it doesn’t work, it’s technology.
- Unknown

Skills are cheap, chemistry is expensive.
– Mal Panacoast

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.
– Louis Pasteur

Chance favors the prepared mind.
– Louis Pasteur

Science…never solves a problem without creating ten more.
– George Bernard Shaw

 All that glitters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons. 
		-- John Desmond Baernal

A tidy laboratory means a lazy chemist.       
		-- Jöns Jacob Berzelius

Chemistry is all about getting lucky.  
		-Robert Curl

It is disconcerting to reflect on the number of students we have flunked in chemistry for not knowing what we later found to be untrue.
		--quoted in Robert L. Weber, Science With a Smile (1992)

My name is Bond, Ionic Bond: Taken, not shared! 
		--Caren Thomas

Chemistry is the bridge between the perceived world of substances and the imagined world of atoms.
--Peter Atkins

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, 
a vital ingredient in beer.”
		--Dave Barry

To think is to practice brain chemistry. 
		– Deepak Chopra

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.  Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.  
		–Mike Adams