Popular Science Quotes

My favorite book is 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.

My deep religiosity [...] found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books.

Through the reading of popular science books, I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true.

As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense.

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public.

I was never exposed as a kid to any real science. I read the occasional popular science book, and I loved Mechanics Illustrated, which had a lot of pseudo-science in it: It wasn't until I got to college that I began to appreciate what physics is all about, and that was really an accident also.

It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.

Science is too important not to be a part of popular culture.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was George Gamow's 'One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science.'

Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.

I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller.

I kept thinking, I'm not going to do political journalism, because there's no way to keep my principles and be a political journalist, so I'll edit a popular science magazine. This will be my salvation, and I'll emerge with my integrity intact. That didn't even happen.

One dictionary that I consulted remarks that "natural history" now commonly means the study of animals and plants "in a popular and superficial way," meaning popular and superficial to be equally damning adjectives. This is related to the current tendency in the biological sciences to label every subdivision of science with a name derived from the Greek. "Ecology" is erudite and profound; while "natural history" is popular and superficial. Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods.

With science becoming far more accessible to all of us, I've become a pretty avid reader and devourer of it. One of the objectives that I had working with Fringe was to get more people talking about it because it's such fun.

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

I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller. It was my first popular book and aroused a great deal of interest. Initially, many people found it difficult to understand. I therefore decided to try to write a new version that would be easier to follow.

Nonfiction is never going to die.

Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.

Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand - not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn't advanced enough.

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly.

I'm a walking advertisement for PBS and for the Discovery Channel. All of my DVR settings are pretty much set to record anything that's on the Discovery Channel. I'm a big fan of 'MythBusters' and 'Deadliest Catch,' and I'm constantly watching 'Moyers & Company' and the 'NewsHour' and 'Antiques Roadshow.'

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder.