Science

I approached fighting, and each contest, as an experiment. I would develop hypotheses on what strategies and techniques were winning, I would set-up experiments (or go into fights)- try them out- run tests- look at the results and try to be as unemotional as possible.

Boxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin

Our capacity to reason is recursive, combinatorial – we can reason about our reason – we can argue, criticise and develop tools that enhance our reason thanks to language and communication. We have the power to build on our reason, to enhance it.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

The theory describes only the way objects interact with one another, without indicating what happens between one interaction and the next one.

Theoretical physicist known for loop quantum gravity research and popular science writing

Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement. That's a very strange reality, and the fact that this theory is so demonstrably correct is radically important to our understanding.

Theoretical Physicist & Bestselling Author on String Theory & Cosmology

Without quantum mechanics, we wouldn't have the modern world… we wouldn't have electronics… we wouldn't have understood the semi-conductor, the computer chip…. All of our modern technology relies on this mathematical description of the world of the very small.

Theoretical physicist, author, and BBC science communicator known for public engagement

The quantum universe is counter-intuitive, it's fuzzy, probabilistic, and suggests things that we would regard as fantastical and magical if we saw them on the everyday scale- yet it's the most powerful theory in science.

Theoretical physicist, author, and BBC science communicator known for public engagement

Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered. Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes.

Theoretical Physicist & Bestselling Author on String Theory & Cosmology

Here's the simple truth everyone should know: 'race' doesn't exist. In 1950, UNESCO held a commission with the world's top evolutionary biologists, ethnologists and cultural anthropologists examining the scientific evidence for this so-called concept of 'race'. Their conclusion was clear: race doesn't exist – there's no evidence to support it.

You have this very activist sociology rather than a dispassionate or objective sociology informing a broadly humanist framework of caring about flourishing versus suffering. When your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it, you've got a problem.

Mathematician & Scholar of Critical Theory Criticism & Academic Discourse

You can't build a bridge or an aircraft using postmodernist feminist epistemology.

Evolutionary Psychologist & Author Known for Consumer Behavior Research

Our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary and incomplete and our explanations of how the world works have therefore to be considered as provisional. This means we have to accept that sometimes we will turn out afterwards to have been wrong.

Former UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator & National Security Adviser

In comparing alternative explanations, it is not necessarily the one with the most evidence apparently in its favour that we should choose but the one with least evidence against it. One solid piece of evidence can demolish a hypothesis.

Former UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator & National Security Adviser

If you don't believe in climate change, it is like telling me you don't believe in gravity. I don't care if you don't believe in gravity and I don't care if you don't believe in climate change… both are affecting you, and there's nothing you can do to deny or neutralize either of them.

Former UN Climate Change Executive Secretary & Global Climate Action Leader

Music is woven into the fabric of the universe. As far back as Pythagoras and Kepler, scientists were writing about the fact that music was intrinsic in the planets… part of the harmonic series in sound. Music is built into our neurology, our survival instincts and our communication.

British-Indian composer and musician known for world music and film scores

The scientist mindset says, I will not let my ideas become an ideology. When I start to form an opinion, I should treat it as a hypothesis before doing some observations or experiments to test it. I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right.

Organizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential

We're outnumbered by bacteria 1.3:1, we're slightly more bacteria than we are human. We're also stardust. We are also 60% water, and that water in our bodies is billions of years old. At an atomic level, 98% of the hydrogen in our bodies came from the bigbang. We're incredibly ancient beings, perhaps we should see ourselves as aliens!

Canadian science broadcaster and host of Discovery Channel's Daily Planet