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One after another, the greatest figures in physics seemed to develop an unexpected late-career interest in the mystery of life itself, even taking abrupt shifts toward the formal study of biology.

Fei-Fei Li • The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

Brenner was in a thoughtful mood, drinking sherry before dinner at King’s College. When he began working with Crick, less than two decades before, molecular biology did not even have a name. Two decades later, in the 1990s, scientists worldwide would undertake the mapping of the entire human genome: perhaps 20,000 genes, 3 billion base pairs. What

James Gleick • The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Physics has long been guided by the Copernican principle, the idea that no scientific theory should grant special status to humans or assume that we and our minds are central to the cosmos. But few theories have managed to account convincingly for this exactitude or explain why the conditions of our world appear to be signaling precisely that.

Meghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

I wrote to the neurologist Edvard Moser, winner of a Nobel Prize for medicine, and asked whether we could evolve into more abstract beings. I questioned whether our understanding of being a part of the whole world could shift to being more about thoughts than about physical proximity. Moser answered: ‘Yes, that makes a lot of sense,’

Erling Kagge • Walking: One Step at a Time

I must say that in this age, people are experiencing a delight, a tremendous delight. The delight that you get when you guess how nature will work in a new situation, never seen before. From experiments and information in a certain range, you can guess what's going to happen in the region where no one has ever explored before. It's a little differe... See more

Richard Feynman • "Seeking New Laws"

IN MODERN thought the awareness that there is something out there that we are not yet awake enough to see is the engine that drives the investigative mind. Relentless and systematic questioning: this is the spirit of scientific intelligence. In this spirit we dissect to see what connects, we dismember to understand the whole, we kill to catch life

Where Science and Miracles Meet

Alan Lightman theatlantic.com

Physicists come off looking particularly bad. After attending a Stephen Hawking lecture about fantastical ideas like wormholes and superstrings and “mini-superspace,” Horgan concludes that Hawking is “less a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker” whose work “can keep us awestruck. But it is not science.”

Adam Mastroianni • Science Will Only End Once We've Licked All the Objects in the Universe

Traditionally, science seeks order by understanding the simplest parts of a system. How does a single gas particle behave given a certain temperature? Which gene in our DNA determines eye color? Scientists then try to develop theories that explain more general observations based on their detailed understanding of the individual parts.