Top 293 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Researchers - Page 4

What is so bad about big government? My indictment of big government is that it is bad because it attacks liberty, prosperity, progress, harmony, and morality. Thanks to big government, we have significantly less of all of those good things than we would if we had been able to keep government right-sized. Big government is cancerous. Like a cancer, it hurts the body and tends to spread, doing more and more harm as it grows. It is time for some radical surgery.

Molecular genetics, our latest wonder, has taught us to spell out the connectivity of the tree of life in such palpable detail that we may say in plain words, "This riddle of life has been solved."

There's been a certain amount of opportunism in the wake of the Paris attacks in 2015, when there was almost a reflexive assumption that, "Oh, if only we didn't have strong encryption out there, these attacks could have been prevented." But, as more evidence has come out - and we don't know all the facts yet - we're seeing very little to support the idea that the Paris attackers were making any kind of use of encryption.

Barry Jones once said that Australia is the only country where the word 'academic' is a pejorative. The academic sector has a vibrant and practical role to play in this complex world of ours. Higher education and research are worthy of your much closer attention. Yes, we can be and should be the clever country. Our progress can be within the highest ethical and moral framework. But this will only happen if we place appropriate emphasis on education, research and innovation within a truly international framework.

When the September 11th attacks happened, only about a year later, the crypto community was holding its breath because here was a time when we just had an absolutely horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and if the NSA and the FBI were unhappy with anything, Congress was ready to pass any law they wanted. The PATRIOT Act got pushed through very, very quickly with bipartisan support and very, very little debate, yet it didn't include anything about encryption.

Cryptography shifts the balance of power from those with a monopoly on violence to those who comprehend mathematics and security design.

Giving cancer to laboratory animals has not and will not help us to understand the disease or to treat those persons suffering from it.

In order for any smartphone manufacturer to decrypt the data on your phone, it has to hold onto a secret that lets it get that access. And that secret or that database of secrets becomes an extremely valuable and useful target for intelligence agencies.

No wonder psychedelics are threatening to an authoritarian religious hierarchy. You don’t need faith to benefit from a psychedelic experience, let alone a priest or even a shaman to interpret it. What you need is courage—courage to drink the brew, eat the mushroom, or whatever it is, and then to pay attention, and make of it what you will. Suddenly, the tools for direct contact with the transcendent other (whether you call it God or something else) is taken from the hands of an anointed elite and given to the individual seeker.

I don't feel that I view things with a pessimistic eye. I should try to say which way events will go rather than which way events should go. We have to be realistic.

You take [mammary] cells, you put them in a dish, and within three days ... they don't make milk. They completely forget.

Magazines and talk shows are filled with people who say that a successful #? marriage is hard and requires a lot of work. But to #? soulmates , their harmony often feels effortless, as though it is the most natural thing in the world to be completely at ease in a #? relationship .

In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequently with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing.

Before brains there was no color or sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion.

... the cooperative forces are biologically the more important and vital. The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself. Our tendencies toward goodness... are as innate as our tendencies toward intelligence; we could do well with more of both.

One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.

I think it's very difficult in the first go-round for congressional people and political people to understand the linkages that exist between us and the rest of the world. That we're not insular anymore.

It is a strange fact, characteristic of the incomplete state of our current knowledge, that totally opposite conclusions are drawn about prehistoric conditions on Earth, depending on whether the problem is approached from the biological or the geophysical viewpoint.

The brain, or cerebrum, is a material entity located inside the skull which may be inspected, touched, weighed, and measured. It is composed of chemicals, enzymes, and humors which may be analyzed. Its structure is characterized by neurons, pathways, and synapses which may be examined directly when they are properly magnified.

My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals.

The fact that all our ape cousins - chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans - can acquire signs - is powerful evidence that our hominid ancestors' first language was gestural and that the vocal version of language was a relatively recent development. My own guess is that vocal language began emerging about 200,000 years ago.

It seems from my unique vantage point as both scientist and editor of JSE that substantial evidence exists of "something going on".

Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context.

We are all constantly transmitting information to the people around us, and the messages we choose to communicate either create success or hold us all hold back.

The particular thing about science is to combine that [the dreams of obtaining power] with a retreat from the world. Other people want to obtain power by going out into the world, but the scientist really wants to obtain power by retreating from the world.

The grand design of nature perceived broadly in four dimensions, including the forces that move the universe and created man, with special focus on evolution in our own biosphere, is something intrinsically good that it is right to preserve and enhance, and wrong to destroy and degrade.

I recently wanted to exercise more, and instead of trying to remind myself about all the health benefits and designing an effective (but boring) workout routine, I thought of the moments in my life when getting a workout has been the most fun.

The flight of most members of a profession to the high empyrean, where they can work peacefully on purely scientific problems, isolated from the turmoil of real life, was perhaps quite appropriate at an earlier stage of science; but in today's world it is a luxury we cannot afford.

So, in 1993, in what was probably the first salvo of the first Crypto War, there was concern coming from the National Security Agency and the FBI that encryption would soon be incorporated into lots of communications devices, and that that would cause wiretaps to go dark. There was not that much commercial use of encryption at that point. Encryption, particularly for communications traffic, was mostly something done by the government.

Social networks are like grease - in some cases, gasoline - for our personal business networking machines. If you aren't plugged in, you will be out-done by better-connected, hyper-networked colleagues and competitors.

And I think that’s a lot of the reason why when you start to fragment your audience, you start to think about what you’re looking for, you’ll go to different spaces, and it parallels what we do as adults. You go to different bars when you’re in the mood for different things. You see different people when you want to go listen to music or when you just want to have a quiet drink with a couple of friends.

I offer a genuine insight into how you can, and should, be a rational, science-believing human being and at the same time know that you are also an immortal spiritual being, a spark of God. I propose a worldview that offers a way out of the hate and fear-driven violence engulfing the planet.

What is needed to break the vicious spiral is a world-wide change in attitudes, values, and social policy. As Einstein put it, "We need a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

I have studied the effects of our new lots of polio vaccine in 100 adult volunteers and during the next few days shall give it to my wife and 2 children as well as to our neighbors and their children.

What is the difference between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's? ...If you were to accept Lomborg's way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing.

Along with planes, running water, electricity, and motorized transportation, the internet is now a fundamental fact of modern life.

The perspective that law enforcement is presenting seems to be a very narrow one that's focused very, very heavily on investigations of past crimes rather than on preventing future crimes. It's very important for policymakers to take that broader view because they're the ones who are trusted to look at the big picture.

There’s no real separation between the real world and the Internet. What we’ve begun to see now is a militarization of that space.

The single most important thing in coaching is turning out educated kids who are ready for society.

People who don't have the interest or aptitude for serious college studies at age 18 may find that later in life they do, but those who enroll just because they think that the mere possession of a college degree is the passport to success will just dig themselves a financial hole.

If a scientist is reading a paper online and clicks through to purchase material, there's value there. It might be a business model; it might be enough to defray the cost of open access. I just want to create the infrastructure that makes movement and sharing easier.

Americans have the mistaken viewpoint that Lady Liberty is only a peacetime luxury who is ill-equipped to fight the nasties. Therefore, they reason, we need an equally nasty Big Brother. Americans have forgotten that Lady Liberty is one ferocious mother when protecting her children.

The impact of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor persons within all countries. It will therefore exacerbate inequalities in health status and access to adequate food, clean water and other resources.

People will often say "You can't change other people." My research shows this societal belief is not only dis-empowering, it is scientifically false.

The diversity of web browsers tomorrow will match the diversity of ink browsers (aka paper) today

Einstein and the Quantum is delightful to read, with numerous historical details that were new to me and cham1ing vignettes of Einstein and his colleagues. By avoiding mathematics, Stone makes his book accessible to general readers, but even physicists who are well versed in Einstein and his physics are likely to find new insights into the most remarkable mind of the modern era.

There's nothing native about young people's engagement with technology.

The so-called scientific basis of the climate problem is within my professional competence as a meteorologist. It is my professional opinion that there is no evidence at all for catastrophic global warming. It is likely that global temperatures will rise a little, much as IPCC predicts, but there is a growing body of evidence that the errant behavior of the Sun may cause some cooling in the foreseeable future.

Computer science doesn't know how to build complex systems that work reliably. This has been a well-understood problem since the very beginning of programmable computers.

The things that make us safest from others make us least from ourselves.

The work on [polio] prevention was long delayed by... misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys

Even in the best times, managing science has been compared to herding cats; it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all.

A program that produces incorrect results twice as fast is infinitely slower.

I think it's interesting because the 1990s ended with the government pretty much giving up. There was a recognition that encryption was important. In 2000, the government considerably loosened the export controls on encryption technology and really went about actively encouraging the use of encryption rather than discouraging it.

The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday.

Birth order effects are like those things that you think you see out of the corner of your eye but that disappear when you look at them closely. They do keep turning up but only because people keep looking for them and keep analyzing and reanalyzing their data until they find them.

The progress of science is tremendously disorderly, and the motivations that lead to this progress are tremendously varied, and the reasons why scientists go into science, the personal motivations, are tremendously varied. I have said ... that science is a haven for freaks, that people go into science because they are misfits, and that it is a sheltered place where they can spin their own yarn and have recognition, be tolerated and happy, and have approval for it.

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal...most of the global average warming over the past 50 years is very likely due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases increases.

An extremely effective instrument would be to put a price on carbon. It is only through the market that you can get a large enough and rapid enough response [to climate change]

We have embarked globally on a path of unsustainable development. Our lifestyles, the way we produce goods and services, are all part of a system that is completely unsustainable. I see solutions to climate change leading to a much larger philosophical shift in the way human society develops. We need a new matrix to define what human progress is.