skeptv:

The Planetary Society Says ‘Thank You’

via sagansense:

CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy is joined by project directors and staff around the world who want you, our members, to know how very grateful we are for your support. 2012 was a great year, here’s to the next.

“

You look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.

- Rosalind Franklin

Letter to Ellis Franklin, no date, possibly summer 1940 whilst Rosalind was an undergraduate at Cambridge.

(via historic-hbics)
sagansense: “Physicists cannot convert this thing to another language. If you want to discuss, learn about and appreciate nature, it’s necessary to find out the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form; we are not so unhumble as to demand that she change before we pay any attention. It seems to me that it’s like all the intellectual arguments that you can make would not in any way or very very little will communicate music to deaf ears what music we experience and what music really is. And all the intellectual arguments in the world will not convince those of ‘the other culture.’ The philosophers who tried to teach you, telling you qualitatively about this thing. Me, who’s trying to describe it to you but is not getting it across because it’s impossible. We’re talking to deaf ears. And it’s perhaps that the horizons are limited, which permits such people to imagine that the center of the universe of interest is man.”

sagansense:

“Physicists cannot convert this thing to another language. If you want to discuss, learn about and appreciate nature, it’s necessary to find out the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form; we are not so unhumble as to demand that she change before we pay any attention.

It seems to me that it’s like all the intellectual arguments that you can make would not in any way or very very little will communicate music to deaf ears what music we experience and what music really is. And all the intellectual arguments in the world will not convince those of ‘the other culture.’

The philosophers who tried to teach you, telling you qualitatively about this thing. Me, who’s trying to describe it to you but is not getting it across because it’s impossible. We’re talking to deaf ears. And it’s perhaps that the horizons are limited, which permits such people to imagine that the center of the universe of interest is man.”

“

The reason we have smartphones, the reason we have television, we’re able to talk on opposite sides of the continent, the reason we have smoke detectors… the reason we have these things is because we understand the reactions - the nuclear reactions - that take place in elements, in protons and neutrons and so on. Without that deep understanding, we wouldn’t have everything you can touch and see in our environment. So this claim that [the age of the Earth] has nothing to do with the economy is just wrong.

- Bill Nye, talking about Sen. Marco Rubio’s claim that he wasn’t qualified to answer a question on the age of the Earth, and that it didn’t matter to the economy anyway. 

Watch Bill Nye’s whole interview with CNN over on Boing Boing.

Of course, you might be surprised to hear that President Obama’s answer to the same question hasn’t been much different in the past.

(via jtotheizzoe)