One sentence

Richard Feynman once said—somewhere in the Feynman Lectures on Physics, I think—that the most informative one-sentence statement to be passed on to future generations through some crash of civilization would describe the notion of atoms:

[...]all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

I'm not sure what the ground rules of this game are; mashing all the sentences of a textbook together with "and" seems like it would be cheating, at the very least. In any event, if I were to nominate one sentence of comparable length to Feynman's as the most useful statement about science, it would not be that one, which after all is not too far from ancient Greek atomism, and would take a high level of technical development to apply properly. It would, rather, be something along the lines of:

Most living things are germs, creatures too small to see that reproduce from parent germs, and that cause fermentation, food spoilage and many diseases.

People could quickly get a lot of value out of that one.

I was thinking about this a few days ago, but the thing that reminded me of it was this talkorigins.org page about spontaneous generation, which includes the remarkable fact that food canning was not invented until the early 19th century, and then was suggested by recent scientific discoveries strongly implying certain parts of my sentence.