It has been said that everything everywhere affects everything else. This may be true.
Or perhaps the world is just full of patterns. (Wings)
Or perhaps the world is just full of patterns. (Wings)
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... there was no such thing as absolute control, not in a fully functioning universe. There was just a variable amount of lack of control. (DW)
... meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a bit before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try to get your mind around the Universe before you give it a twist. (IT)
Sometimes, if you pay real close attention to the pebbles you find out about the ocean. (LL)
‘This isn’t magic, is it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Johhny. ‘It’s probably just very, very, very strange science.’ ‘Oh, good,’ said Yo-Less. ‘Er …. What’s the difference?’ (JB) Over Holy Wood the stars were out. They were huge balls of hydrogen heated to millions of degrees, so hot they could not even burn. Many of them would swell enormously before they died, and then shrink to tiny, resentful dwarfs remembered only by sentimental astronomers. In the meantime, they glowed because of metamorphoses beyond the reach of alchemists, and turned mere boring elements into pure light. (MP)
Biology isn’t just physics and chemistry with knobs on. It’s a whole new world. (JD)
He was, Marjorie considered, one of the most useful people: a house-trained near-nerd, conscientious to the point of insanity but not any further, apparently. (JD)
Scientific revolutions don’t change the universe. They change how humans interpret it. (JD)
Every scientific statement is provisional. Politicians hate this. How can anyone trust scientists? If new evidence comes along, they change their minds. (JD)
… it is the nature of Great Big Things that if the money isn’t spent on them, it isn’t spent on smaller scientific projects either. Small projects don’t advance bureaucratic or political careers as effectively as big ones. (JD)
Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. (LL)
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails
if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed. (M) 'If only we had laboratories to produce self-replicating scientists, to explore all the worlds. Ah, but we do! They're called university campuses.' (LW)
It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it. (RS)
But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions, which is just as well, or it wouldn’t be much of a career path, would it? (LE}
… it is generally agreed that water has memory. It knew the score: you evaporated, you floated around in a cloud until somebody organised everybody, and then you all fell down as rain. (Sn)
'Religion is not an exact science. Sometimes, of course, neither is science.' (N)
He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty which dismissed all opposition. (N)
Granny Weatherwax wouldn’t know what a pattern of quantum inevitability was if she found it eating her dinner. If you mentioned the words ‘paradigm of space-time’ to her she’d just say ‘What?’ But that didn’t mean she was ignorant. It just meant that she didn’t have truck with words, especially gibberish. (WA)
It is no sound on the moon, but this doesn’t matter because there is no one to hear anything. Sound would just be a
waste. (Wings) It is said that the opposite of noise is silence. This isn’t true. Silence is only the absence of noise. (LF)
'Nothing ever finishes. Nothing’s ever really over.’
It was Johnny who said that. He was surprised at himself. ‘Correct! Are you a physicist?’ ‘Me?’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t know the anything about science!’ ‘Marvellous! Ideal qualification!’ said Einstein. ‘What?’ 'Ignorance is very important! It is an absolutely essential step in the learning process!' (JD) GRAVITY: This is not properly understood, but it is what makes small things, like nomes, stick to big things, like planets. Because of SCIENCE, this happens whether you you know about gravity or not. Which just goes to show that Science is happening all the time. (Wings)
SCIENCE: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it’s wrong. There is a lot more to Science than you think. (Wings)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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