“... nothing in Nature is black or white, few solutions are clean and c...” — Eric Chaisson Quote

“... nothing in Nature is black or white, few solutions are clean and clear; rather, reality, and especially our models of it, possess shades of gray throughout.”

“... researchers argue that it's of utmost importance to unravel the nature of black holes, lest we someday begin to worship them. Sounds ridiculous, but whole segments of humankind have often revered the unknowable, venerating that which cannot be tested experimentally. Come to think of it, many still do in twenty-first-century society.”

“Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.”

“Just as there are those who accept every UFO report at face value, there are also those who dismiss the idea of alien visitation out of hand and with great passion. It is, they say, unnecessary to examine the evidence, and “unscientific” even to contemplate the issue. I once helped to organize a public debate at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science between proponent and opponent scientists of the proposition that some UFOs were spaceships; whereupon a distinguished physicist, whose judgment in many other matters I respected, threatened to sic the Vice President of the United States on me if I persisted in this madness. (Nevertheless, the debate was held and published, the issues were a little better clarified, and I did not hear from Spiro T. Agnew.)”

“Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.”

“Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”

“The fact that entangled particles can influence each other faster than the speed of light is taken as proof that there is a spiritual domain of instant communication outside material reality; the fact that a wave function collapses into reality through observation is interpreted as a proof that observation creates reality... no wonder many podcasts claim that quantum mechanics proves material reality is a simulacrum, that all there is, is spirit, etc.”