Ben Miller Quotes

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.

People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognised, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.

General writing about science, even if we do it badly, helps us to see our work in perspective and broadens our vision.

There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.

At school, my favorite subjects were history, biology, chemistry, and physics. Especially the teaching in physics was excellent. Most of my understanding of it I got at high school, not at the university.

I'm, like, not a science person at all.

My father was not only a planetary scientist and a great popularizer of science, but he thought very deeply about the world. He was a scholar, he studied history. He taught a class in critical thinking, and he was very, very aware of the directions we might go.

It is clear that everybody interested in science must be interested in world 3 objects. A physical scientist, to start with, may be interested mainly in world 1 objects--say crystals and X-rays. But very soon he must realize how much depends on our interpretation of the facts, that is, on our theories, and so on world 3 objects. Similarly, a historian of science, or a philosopher interested in science must be largely a student of world 3 objects.

All this science I don't understand, it's just my job five days a week.

Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

It's very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.

There are great science books that were conceived as books. Feynman's famous introductory lectures in physics, which have a beginning and an end, which are written with style.

Technology is knowledge of how the universe works that enables you to change the world.

What distinguishes the language of science from language as we ordinarily understand the word? ... What science strives for is an utmost acuteness and clarity of concepts as regards their mutual relation and their correspondence to sensory data.

I very much was inspired by Bill Bryson. He does cover science, but more often, it's a mixture of science and travel, and whatever he happens to be writing about - Shakespeare, Australia, the United Kingdom, or when he covers science in 'A Short History Of Nearly Everything' - he has an incredible ability to be both entertaining and enlightening.

I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.

I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?"

We find in the course of nature that though the effects be many, the principles from which they arise are commonly few and simple, and that it is the sign of an unskilled naturalist to have recourse to a different quality in order to explain every different operation.

I hope that my children, at least, if not I myself, will see the day when ignorance of the primary laws and facts of science will be looked upon as a defect only second to ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.