Hold up a mirror and ask yourself what you are capable of doing, and what you really care about. Then take the initiative - don't wait for someone else to ask you to act.
Sylvia EarleRead
Scientists never stop asking. They're little kids who never grew up.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the relentless curiosity and wonder of scientists, likening them to children who are always eager to learn and explore.
Sylvia Earle's quote highlights the innate curiosity that fuels scientific inquiry, suggesting that scientists possess a childlike wonder that drives them to ask questions and seek knowledge. It implies that this perpetual curiosity is essential to the scientific process, as it leads to discoveries and innovation, much like how a child explores the world around them with fascination and enthusiasm.
In practice
In a speech about scientific innovation, one could use this quote to inspire young scientists.
Hold up a mirror and ask yourself what you are capable of doing, and what you really care about. Then take the initiative - don't wait for someone else to ask you to act.
I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls 'tomorrow's child,' asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time.
Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea.
There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet-as if the ocean somehow doesn't matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean...We are learning otherwise.
No water, no life. No blue, no green.
I have come up at the end of a dive, and the boat was not where I left it. I had to take care of a buddy who did panic. But I was confident the boat would come back.
Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.
The best way to conduct research on a larger scale is to make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing... The sooner the better - start talking to other people about what you're doing. Because that's what will stimulate things the fastest.
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'
My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.
Stone tools are fossilized human behavior.
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