Science Humor Quotes

“the table of elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator

“The nobility of the human spirit grows harder for me to believe in. War, zealotry, greed, malls, narcissism. I see a backhanded nobility in excessive, impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying “I bet we can do this.” Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government red-lining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let’s squander some on Mars. Let’s go out and play.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“My father would argue two side of a möbius strip.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.”
― Philip Nelson, Biological Physics: Energy, Information, Life

“For large values of 1, 1 approaches 2, for small values of 2.”
― Keith Caserta

“Ask Gandhi, and eye for an eye makes us both blind.....ask an engineer, and the numbers don't lie - the first to strike wins.”
― Steven Ivy - Attorney Entrepreneur

“In some universes, all possible pasts funnel towards a single fixed ending, Ω.

It you are of millenarian bent, you might call Ω Armageddon, If you are of grammatical bent, you might call it punctuation on a cosmological scale.

If you are a philosopher in such a universe, you might call Ω inevitable.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Her computer’s fan whirred to life, blowing warm air onto her fingers. Two flame-red slits glowed from the monitor. The speakers boomed. “I lived! I died! I live again!”
Olivie had dealt with blue screens, frozen hourglasses, and even the odd hardware conflict back in the day. This was new.”
― Choong JayVee, In Memory: A Tribute to Sir Terry Pratchett

“To begin with, for you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under appreciated state known as existence”
― Bill Bryson

“Somos víctimas de nuestro ADN y punto.”
― Peter Holt, CHROMOSOME 8

“If we have a very big problem to deal with, it is the problem of realism, because we are weaker than our emotions.”
― Aihebholo-oria Okonoboh

“So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment -- by simulation, that is mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann's Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F_1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the chandelier—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, "Hurrah! Victory!!”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

“We go to three parks. We walk nonstop or else she cries. The baby likes moving, especially moving at high speeds, so we go on swings. She opens one eye and looks at me with profound suspicion. What is this contraption? she asks silently, a tiny cyclops in my hands.

This is a simple harmonic oscillator, I say, a pendulum; this is periodic motion.

Wheeeee is the sound I think her temporal lobe wants to make" (p125)”
― Weike Wang, Chemistry

“honest is the best policy”
― Naema Al Hashi

“What we call creative work, Ought not to be called work at all because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a days work in the last fifty years.”
― Stephen B.Leacock

“Stephen Hawking is not the greatest mind on the planet, just the most intelligent comedian”
― Marshall Barnes

“The outgroup is rocks.”
― Joseph Felsenstein, Inferring Phylogenies

“It is just that modern physicists seem to have more imaginative ways of naming new particles and phenomena - they no longer restrict themselves to Greek!”
― Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time

“We now know that every particle has an antiparticle, with which it can annihilate. (In the case of the force-carrying particles, the antiparticles are the same as the particles themselves.) There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“.... attempts to combine these two forces with the strong nuclear force into what is called a grand unified theory (GUT). This title is rather an exaggeration: the resultant theories are not all that grand, nor are they fully unified, as they do not include gravity. Nor are they really complete theories, because they contain a number of parameters whose values cannot be predicted from a theory but have to be chosen to fit in with experiment. Nevertheless, they may be a step toward a complete, fully unified theory.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time

“Despite this, I have a bet with Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology that in fact Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole! This is a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would bring me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet, in 1975, we were 80 per cent certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95 per cent certain, but the bet has yet to be settled.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time

“The existence of radiation from black holes seems to imply that gravitational collapse is not as final and irreversible as we once thought. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, its mass will increase, but eventually the energy equivalent of that extra mass will be returned to the universe in the form of radiation. Thus, in a sense, the astronaut will be 'recycled'. It would be a poor sort of immortality, however, because any personal concept of time for the astronaut would almost certainly come to an end as he was torn apart inside the black hole! Even the types of particles that were eventually emitted by the black hole would in general be different from those that made up the astronaut: the only feature of the astronaut that would survive would be his mass or energy.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“... picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humour - he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors 'Alpher, Bethe, Gamow'...”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“Sexiest mind game ever played - Chess.”
― Neisha Alana Henderson

“Science is a satisfactory curiosity.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“I do not care what yew believe, nor does the Universe, know it or no it not.”
― Jeffrey Scott Flesher

“one of the healthy vegetable with different color, it come in by a lot of fun and beautiful fall season. Gardening, seasons, life, and what people doing with pumpkin. Family can have a lot of fun and enjoy their time (and at the same time learn a lot of new things)”
― Jill Esbaum, Seed, Sprout, Pumpkin, Pie

“Everyone loves a good iceberg, and this one is a corker." professor of Earth Observation at the University of Leeds”
― Andrew Shepherd, InSAR: Applications in Geoscience

“If she didn't know better, Mahit could think he was an automation. Even an artificial intelligence had more immediately apparent volition.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Is that a microscope?” I ask, looking at the array of glass slides, tweezers, and eye droppers next to what is definitely a microscope. “Please tell me you’re not playing doctor in the living room.”

“We’re playing scientist, dummy,” Joey says.

“I’m showing him what different stuff looks like under magnification.”

“I looked at a dust mite,” Joey says. “I am not okay.”
― Melanie Jacobson, Betting on the Brainiac