Many of the problems facing the nation and the world today may only be solved if their technical elements are understood - climate change, energy supply, health care, and infrastructure, to name just a few.
John C. MatherRead
Talk to people... everything good I've done has come from conversations with people. Science is a very social phenomenon.
Interpretation
Engaging with others fosters good ideas and progress.
This quote emphasizes the importance of communication and collaboration in scientific endeavors. John C. Mather highlights that many positive outcomes in his work arose from interactions and conversations, suggesting that science thrives on social interactions and shared knowledge among individuals.
In practice
In a team meeting, to encourage open dialogue and brainstorming.
Many of the problems facing the nation and the world today may only be solved if their technical elements are understood - climate change, energy supply, health care, and infrastructure, to name just a few.
Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.
There's no such thing as saying that we'll ever find the ultimate cause of stuff. We can only work to push our understanding one step further.
My interest in science started quite early. My earliest school recollection, from age 6, is actually of mathematics, realizing that one could fill an entire page with digits and never come to the largest possible number, so I saw what was meant by infinity.
Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.
We are discovering what the universe is really like, and it is totally magnificent, and one can only be inspired and awestruck by what we find.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.
Given the power and influence that science increasingly has in our daily lives, it is important that we as citizens of an open and democratic society learn to separate good science from bunk. This is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity, as it affects where large portions of our tax money go, and in some cases even whether peopleβs lives are lost as a result of nonsense.
If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians.
Receiving the National Medal of Science is the thrill of a lifetime, but good science does not happen in isolation.
Science is a way of getting knowledge. It's a method. It's a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It's a way that everyone can go through life; that's how we should be teaching science from a very young age.
The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.
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