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Lewis Thomas
(25 Nov 1913 - 3 Dec 1993)
American physician and author best known for his reflective essays on a wide range of topics in biology.
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Lewis Thomas Quotes on Universe (5 quotes)
>> Click for 61 Science Quotes by Lewis Thomas
>> Click for Lewis Thomas Quotes on | Ant | DNA | Error | Gene | Knowledge | Language | Learning | Life | Mind | Nature | New | Science | Species | Truth |
>> Click for 61 Science Quotes by Lewis Thomas
>> Click for Lewis Thomas Quotes on | Ant | DNA | Error | Gene | Knowledge | Language | Learning | Life | Mind | Nature | New | Science | Species | Truth |
A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable. He lives with data that cannot be numbered, and his experiments can be done only once. The information in a poem is, by definition, not reproducible. ... He becomes an equivalent of scientist, in the act of examining and sorting the things popping in [to his head], finding the marks of remote similarity, points of distant relationship, tiny irregularities that indicate that this one is really the same as that one over there only more important. Gauging the fit, he can meticulously place pieces of the universe together, in geometric configurations that are as beautiful and balanced as crystals.
— Lewis Thomas
In The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974, 1995), 107.
I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.
— Lewis Thomas
In 'On Science and Certainty', Discover Magazine (Oct 1980).
It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.
— Lewis Thomas
The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.
— Lewis Thomas
In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony(1984), 16.
The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. We are only now beginning to appreciate how strange and splendid it is, how it catches the breath, the loveliest object afloat around the sun, enclosed in its own blue bubble of atmosphere, manufacturing and breathing its own oxygen, fixing its own nitrogen from the air into its own soil, generating its own weather at the surface of its rain forests, constructing its own carapace from living parts: chalk cliffs, coral reefs, old fossils from earlier forms of life now covered by layers of new life meshed together around the globe, Troy upon Troy.
— Lewis Thomas
In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1984), 22-23.
See also:
- 25 Nov - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Thomas's birth.
- The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Lewis Thomas.
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) -- 
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