Avert Quotes (5 quotes)
It’s never been more important for us to understand the effects of biodiversity loss… only if we do that, will we have any hope of averting disaster.
From BBC TV program Extinction: The Facts (13 Sep 2020). As quoted in press release on a BBC Media Centre web page.
Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.
In Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), 5.
The dangers threatening modern science cannot be averted by more experimenting, for our complicated experiments have no longer anything to do with nature in her own right, but with nature charged and transformed by our own cognitive activity.
As quoted by Erich Heller in The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (1952), 26.
The greatest possibility of evil in self-medication [with penicillin] is the use of too-small doses, so that, instead of clearing up the infection, the microbes are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms is bred out which can be passed on to other individuals and perhaps from there to others until they reach someone who gets a septicemia or a pneumonia which penicillin cannot save. In such a case the thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted.
In 'Penicillin’s Finder Assays Its Future: Sir Alexander Fleming Says Improved Dosage Method is Needed to Extend Use', New York Times (26 Jun 1945), 21.
We called the new [fourth] quark the “charmed quark” because we were pleased, and fascinated by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world. “Charm” also means a “a magical device to avert evil,” and in 1970 it was realized that the old three quark theory ran into very serious problems. ... As if by magic the existence of the charmed quark would [solve those problems].
From asppearance in the BBC-TV program written by Nigel Calder, 'The Key to the Universe,' (27 Jan 1977). As cited in Arthur Lewis Caso, 'The Production of New Scientific Terms', American Speech (Summer 1980), 55, No. 2, 102.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
