In the entrails of the dead one man was seeking the truth: his name was John Hunter. ibid.
What the surgeon did was to cut and hope for the best. ibid. Robert Winston
Hunter did hundreds of dissections. ibid.
John Hunter wrote three great treatises ... And became the highest paid surgeon in the land. ibid.
He helped take surgery from butchery to science. ibid.
Edward Jenner was a country doctor ... Jenner was interested in everything. ibid. Richard Dawkins
Edward Jenner took on the number one killer in the eighteenth century: Smallpox. ibid.
Jenner had demonstrated the possibility of vaccination. ibid.
Jenner is rightly regarded as the father of immunology. ibid.
Henry Cavendish: one of the most brilliant, if strange, men of the eighteenth century. ibid. Jim Al-Khalili
Cavendish probed the secrets of Nature with brilliant insights and meticulous experiments. ibid.
His [Cavendish] discovery in 1766 of one of the most important elements in the universe ... Cavendish had discovered hydrogen. ibid.
[Joseph] Priestley was his direct opposite ... He made huge contributions to electricity and optics, but also to theology and philosophy. ibid.
He had discovered soda water. ibid.
Priestley discovered ... oxygen, the secret of life. ibid.
Joseph Priestley is credited with identifying ten different gasses. ibid.
Banks was also president of the Royal Society. ibid. David Attenborough
It was curiosity which drove them. ibid. Stephen Hawking
The world is full of wonders. But they become more wonderful not less wonderful when science looks at them. ibid. David Attenborough
Our story began in the 17th century with a handful of men who enlightened the puzzle of gravity. The next generation put science out into the world. They harnessed steam to kickstart the industrial revolution. We want to tell you about their heirs – six men of ambition who between them would use science to light up the world. Science had come of age. Genius of Britain III: The Lights Come On, Hawking
Michael Faraday – and if one man switched on the lights of the world it was him … Faraday had shown us how to harness electricity to harness a motor. ibid. Dyson
One idea towers above the others – evolution. It explains how we gradually came into being and how all living things are connected. ibid. Hawking
Brunel wasn’t just an engineering pioneer, he made quantum leaps into the unknown. ibid. Dyson
It would take the ambition of William Thomson to enlight the global potential of this new [telegraphy] technology. ibid. Hawking
The physicists’ physicist – and the man whose work revolutionised global communications – James Clerk Maxwell. ibid.
Light, electricity and magnetism were all connected in a fundamental way. ibid. Al-Khalili
[Robert] Watson-Watt was a physicist and a government expert on radio waves … ‘It should be possible to detect them [enemy aircraft] … It took them just five months’ … Radar gave Britain the edge. Genius of Britain IV, Al-Khalili
Alan Turing’s story is an extraordinary one … The mind and how it worked would obsess Turing throughout his short life … ibid. Dawkins
Frank Whittle, May 15th 1941: The test flight of Britain’s first jet. ibid. Dyson
Alexander Fleming and his discovery of Penicillin … A glass plate that had been left unwashed … He wasn’t the tidiest of men. ibid. Biologist
Paul Dirac: He uncovered one of the great secrets of the universe … The Dirac equation. ibid. Hawking/Sykes
Joseph Banks … amateur naturalist … lauded in his own time … Genius of Britain V, Attenborough
James Watt: The answer was to cool and condense the steam in a separate chamber outside the main cylinder. ibid. scientist
[John] Hunter did hundreds of dissections and little by little he built up a detailed knowledge of human anatomy. ibid.
Cavendish: He called the new gas inflammable air. Cavendish had discovered hydrogen … ibid.
Priestley: had discovered oxygen … Joseph Priestley is credited with identifying ten different gases. ibid.
Galileo’s work became the rock on which modern physics is founded. Dara O’Briain’s Science Club II, BBC 2012
Our universe seems to be made up of stars and planets and gas that are clumped together with vast gaps in between them. On an atomic level it’s pretty much all space. ibid.
What is nothing? ... Nothing lies at the heart of physics. ibid.
There is no such thing as the Ether. ibid.
Nothing doesn’t exist. ibid. Jim Al-Khalili
Gravitational waves: the hunt … [for] ripples in space-time. ibid.
Can we actually afford some of these huge science experiments? ibid.
Cities: over half of us worldwide now live this way; we’ve become an urban species. Dara O’Briain’s Science Club, BBC 2013
‘We should become a two-planet species.’ ibid. Professor Michio Kaku
Galvanism was the belief that electricity was the spark of life, perhaps even the very essence of life itself. Brian Cox, Science Britannica I: Frankenstein’s Monsters, BBC 2013
Our contribution to global science has been enormous. ibid.
Frankenstein becomes a stereotype: a view of science as darkness as well as light. ibid.
The nuclear project began with this man – Ernest Rutherford. ibid.
Isaac Newton: to be buried in W A was an honour usually reserved for kings and nobles … Newton was no ordinary man. Brian Cox, Science Britannica II: Method and Madness
British scientists have made and continue to make some of the great scientific discoveries. ibid.
Newton was one of the first to interrogate nature using the principles of what we now call the Scientific Method. ibid.
Bill Tutte had achieved the seemingly impossible: he’d done it by applying the principles of logic enshrined in the Scientific Method. ibid.
Cavendish embodies what science and what being a scientist is all about: his curiosity about the world drove him to design experiments in an effort to gain new insights into how the world works. ibid.
Peer review is an attempt to introduce an extra layer of rigour. ibid.
Boyle’s List: all but two of twenty four things on this list have now been achieved by science. Brian Cox, Science Britannica III: Clear Blue Skies
George Watt and George Stephenson harnessed steam power. Where Rutherford and Chadwick unravalled the architecture of the atom. Where Edward Jenner worked out the principles of vaccination. ibid.
Blue-sky research is important. ibid.
The Pharmaceutic Industry in Britain is a triumph for home-grown science ... Science on an industrial scale ... Targeted science. ibid.
[William] Perkin helped usher in the dawn of organic chemistry. ibid.
Science is based on curiosity ... Space for the dreamers to dream. ibid.
Nothing gives us greater pride than the importance of India’s scientific and engineering colleges, or the army of Indian scientists at organizations such as Microsoft and NASA. Our temples are not the god-encrusted shrines of Varanasi, but Western scientific institutions like Caltech and MIT, and magazines like Nature and Scientific American. Aravind Adiga
A bishop wrote gravely to The Times inviting all nations to destroy ‘the formula’ of the atomic bomb. There is no simple remedy for ignorance so abysmal. Peter Medawar, The Hope of Progress, 1972