Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs.

So much of what we understand comes from knowing what something is and what that something used to be, which allows us to figure out, or at least imagine, what happened in between.

A common way to compute density is, of course, to take the ratio of an object's mass to its volume. But other types of densities exist, such as the resistance of somebody's brain to the imparting of common sense.

If there's something that someone else can do, let them do it. If I couldn't do it uniquely, let someone else do it and I would get back to the lab.

I'm not a scientist, I was not a good science student, I felt effectively alienated from science throughout my young life, and it was only when I became an adult that I began to really appreciate from a completely different angle the power of science.

The most successful people recognize that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.