"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose." J. B. S. Haldane ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." Albert Einstein ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" Steven Weinberg ----------------------------------------------------------------- "If you would not be forgotten As soon as you are dead and rotten Either write things worth reading, Or do things worth the writing." Benjamin Franklin ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Scientific research consists in seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what no one else has thought" Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Nobel Prize 1937 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I am an old man, and when I die and go to heaven, there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. About the former, I am really rather optimistic." Sir Horace Lamb, 1931 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Bernard Shaw ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The physicist rightly dreads precise argument, since an argument which is only convincing if precise loses all its force if the assumptions upon which it is based are slightly changed, while an argument which is convincing though imprecise may well be stable under small perturbations of its underlying axioms." From "The Pernicious Influence of Mathematics on Science" by Mark Kac ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Exact quote, no, but I do recall that there were two parts to it: He was asked first by Queen Victoria of what use electricity was, and replied that the question might similarly be asked of an infant; someday, it would become an adult and then the answer would be known. Subsequently, Gladstone, the Chairman of the Exchequer, asked this, and Faraday replied that presently it would be taxed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "As soon as we have some large computers working, the problems of meteorology will be solved. All processes that are stable we shall predict, and all processes that are unstable we shall control." John von Neumann, 1950. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "A theoretical physicist is a physicist without the ability to perform real experiments. A mathematical physicist is a mathematician without the ability to perform real mathematics." David Mermin ----------------------------------------------------------------- "There is lots of music still to be written in C major." Arnold Schoenberg ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable while literature is unread." Oscar Wilde ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer". ----------------------------------------------------------------- "In this section, a mathematical model of the growing embryo will be described. This model will be a simplification and an idealization, and consequently a falsification. It is to be hoped that the features retained for discussion are those of greatest importance in the present state of knowledge." A. M. Turing, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis", Aug, 1952. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "If an experiment does not hold out the possibility of causing one to revise one's views, it is hard to see why it should be done at all." Peter B. Medawar ----------------------------------------------------------------- Why computer manuals drive people crazy: "Type the field name Name in the Field Name field." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Quidquid latine dictum sit, alutum viditur. "Anything said in Latin sounds profound." ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Physics is a branch of knowledge that is just about complete. The important discoveries, all of them, have been made. It is hardly worth entering physics anymore." Max Planck's physics teacher ----------------------------------------------------------------- "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field." Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962) ----------------------------------------------------------------- The motto of Jacque Cousteau's ship the Calypso: "Il faut aller voir" ("We must go and see for ourselves"). Cousteau died Wednesday, June 25, 1997. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Don't take yourself too seriously, but you had better take the physics very seriously." Robert Dicke ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than in theory." ----------------------------------------------------------------- "More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency, without necessarily achieving it, than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity." W.A. Wulf ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and in science.... He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. The sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as feeble reflexion, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is." - Albert Einstein ----------------------------------------------------------------- From "The Camel's Nose" by Knut Schimdt-Nielsen "Many years ago I heard the tale of Hevesy's [George de Hevesy, Hungarian chemist] first radioactive tracer experiment, one that never made it into the scientific literature. While in Manchester, he lived in a boardinghouse where the meals were less than appealing. There, as in boardinghouses everywhere, the tenants surmised that hash was made from leftovers and plate scrapings from the previous day. "To confirm his suspicions, one night Hevesy surreptitiously added a small amount of polonium to the food he left on his plate. The next day, he brought to dinner an electroscope, consisting of a glass case in which a light strip of thin gold foil stands out horizontally when the instrument carries an electric charge, but hangs down limply when the charge is lost. Hevesy rubbed his pocket comb against his woolen vest and transferred the static charge to the electroscope. The gold leaf stood straight out until the expected platter of hash appeared on the table; at the moment the gold leaf dropped to the discharged position, indicating the presence of ionizing radiation. Hevesy is said to have moved to a different boardinghouse. If the story is true, this may well have been the world's first radioactive tracer experiment." ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Wernher von Braun ----------------------------------------------------------------- "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Stephen Weinberg ----------------------------------------------------------------- In Oliver Sacks New Yorker article "Brilliant Lights" (12/20/99, pages 56-73), he quotes Niels Bohr as saying: "Prior to this [invention of quantum theory], spectra seemed as beautiful and meaningless as butterfly wings" Rather amusing since butterfly wings are now rather well understood in terms of pattern formation. ----------------------------------------------------------------- During 1969 hearings, Senator Pastore asked Robert Wilson to explain how the research would be important to national defense. "It has nothing to do with defending our country," Wilson replied, "except to make it worth defending." ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Science is the art of systematic simplification" Karl Popper ----------------------------------------------------------------- "My problem is that I know too much to tackle that. I'm a strong believer that ignorance is important in science. If you know too much, you start seeing why things won't work. That's why it's important to change your field to collect more ignorance." Sydney Brenner, biologist. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I intend to stop speaking before you stop listening." George J. Mitchell, the former senator from Maine, told his audience at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "If we can shrink the world's population to a village of only 100 people, keeping all existing ratios the same, that village would look like this: there would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere -- north and south -- and 21 Africans; 52 would be female; 70 would be nonwhite and 30 white; 70 would be non-Christian and 30 would be Christian. Six of the 100 people would own 59 percent of all the wealth in the world, and all 6 of those people would be from the United States. Eighty of the 100 people would live in substandard housing. Seventy would be unable to read and write. Fifty would suffer from malnutrition. One would have a college education." Julian Bond, Chairman, N.A.A.C.P. Washington University, St. Louis. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contains such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality--or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way." Richard Feynman in Volume II, Section 41, page 12 of "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", 1964. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Pepper intensity is measured in Scoville units, a system devised in 1912 by Wilbur Scoville, a Detroit pharmacologist. Jalapeno peppers rate 2,500 to 5,000 units. The habanero extract used by Dr. Osborn registers 1,000,000 Scoville units. From a NY Times article on using pepper to prevent elephants from raiding a farm. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." Poet Muriel Rukeyser. ----------------------------------------------------------------- In regard to a wrong answer to a math question, teacher says to the student "Save that answer---I might ask that question someday." ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors". T. H. Huxley: ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Philosophy is written in this immense book that stands ever open before our eyes (I speak of the Universe), but it cannot be read if one does not first learn the language and recognize the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical Galilei, Galileo (1564 - 1642) Opere Il Saggiatore p. 171. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so." Galilei, Galileo (1564 - 1642) Quoted in H. Weyl "Mathematics and the Laws of Nature" in I Gordon and S. Sorkin (eds.) The Armchair Science Reader, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I assign more value to discovering a fact, even about the minute thing, than to lengthy disputations on the Grand Questions that fail to lead to true understanding whatever" Galileo Galilei ----------------------------------------------------------------- "One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment." Steven Weinberg, U. of Texas, Dallas Morning News, Oct 23, 2001. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." Albert Einstein ----------------------------------------------------------------- "It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." Paul Dirac ----------------------------------------------------------------- "It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. For this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom." Einstein, in regard to modern methods of education. ----------------------------------------------------------------- What do you get when you cross an elephant with a zebra? Elephant zebra sin theta. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Motto of the Paleontological Societyr: "Frango ut patefaciam." "I break in order to reveal." Good choice for particle physics also. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Biting into an apple and finding a maggot is unpleasant enough, but finding half a maggot is worse. Discovering one-third of a maggot would be more distressing still: The less you find, the more you may have eaten. Extrapolating to the limit, an encounter with no maggot at all should be the ultimate bad-apple experience. This remorseless logic fails however, because the limit is singular: A very small maggot fraction (f << 1) is qualitatively different from no maggot (f=0). Limits in physics can be singular too---indeed they usually are---reflecting deep aspects of our scientific description of the world." Article "Singular Limits" by Michael Berry, Physics Today May 2002, pages 10-11 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five." Groucho Marx ----------------------------------------------------------------- "There's a reason physicists are so successful with what they do, and that is they study the hydrogen atom and the helium ion and then they stop." Richard Feynman ----------------------------------------------------------------- Changeux's paradox: how do 30,000 human genes determine 10^11 neural cells with 10^15 connections? From J.-P. Changeux, "Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind" (trans. Garey, L.; Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt." Lev Landau ----------------------------------------------------------------- Samuel Johnson once said, "There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it." ----------------------------------------------------------------- I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove And in our bound partition never part. Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(thi)! Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The best evidence we have that there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe is that nobody has tried to contact us." Calvin and Hobbes ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously?" Noah Chomsky ----------------------------------------------------------------- "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983) ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." Churchill ----------------------------------------------------------------- "We are all agreed that your theory is absolutely crazy. But what divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough." Niels Bohr, when asked for his opinion of Wolfgang Pauli's unified theory. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I should think we might fairly gauge the future of biological science, centuries ahead, by estimating the time it will take to reach a complete, comprehensive understanding of odor. It may not seem a profound enough problem to dominate all the life sciences, but it contains, piece by piece, all the mysteries." From Lewis Thomas's essay "On Smell", in his book "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's 9th Symphony (New York, Viking, 1983) ----------------------------------------------------------------- "When nothing else subsists from the past," he wrote, "after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory." Marcel Proust ----------------------------------------------------------------- "While I was gone, someone stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with an exact replica. When I told my roommate, he said, "Do I know you?" Stephen Wright ----------------------------------------------------------------- Vicomte de Valvert: Ah... your nose... hem! Your nose is rather large! Cyrano (gravely): Rather. Valvert (simpering): Oh well-- Cyrano (coolly): Is that all? Valvert (turns away with a shrug): Well of course-- Cyrano: Ah no, young sir! You are too simple. Why, you might have said -- Oh a great many things! Mon dieu, why waste your opportunity? For example, thus: AGGRESSIVE: I, sir, if that nose were mine, I'd have it amputated - on the spot! FRIENDLY: How do you drink with such a nose? You ought to have a cup made specially. DESCRIPTIVE: 'Tis a rock - a crag - a cape - A cape? say rather a peninsula! INQUISITIVE: What is that receptacle - A razor-case or a portfolio? KINDLY: Ah, do you love the little birds so much that they come and sing to you, you give them this to perch on? INSOLENT: Sir, when you smoke, the neighbours must suppose your chimney is on fire. ENTERPRISING: What a sign for some perfumer! SIMPLE: When do they unveil the monument? "Cyrano de Bergerac", play written by Edmond Rostand (1868-1918). ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Long range detailed weather predictions is therefore impossible, and the only detailed prediction which is possible is the inference of the ultimate trend and character of a storm from observations of its early stages; and the accuracy of this prediction is subject to the condition that the flight of a grasshopper in Montana may turn a storm aside from Philadelphia to New York." W. S. Franklin of Lehigh in Phys. Rev 6:170-175 (1898): This is long before Lorenz and his butterfly! ----------------------------------------------------------------- "There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants that have to be determinted. The correspondence is very close, but the subject of cryptograpy is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily." Alan Turing ----------------------------------------------------------------- "There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper." Francis Crick in his 1994 book "The Astonishing Hypothesis". ----------------------------------------------------------------- "We are not who we are simply because we think. We are who we are because we can remember what we have thought about". Larry Squire and Eric Kandel ----------------------------------------------------------------- At the present time it is of course quite customary for physicists to trespass on chemical ground, for mathematicians to do excellent work in physics, and for physicists to develop new mathematical procedures. Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science. Wolfgang Koehler (1887-1967) ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Science is about why; engineering is about why not." Dean Kamen ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Trying to understand vision by studying only neurons is like trying to understand bird flight by studying only feathers: it just cannot be done." David Marr in his book Vision (W. H. Freeman, 1982) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Letter to Einstein from a student Carol of Zanesville, Ohio, November 12, 1952 Dear Dr. Einstein, I am a pupil in the sixth grade at Westview school. We have been talking about animals and plants in Science. There are a few children in our room who do not understand why people are classed as animals. I would appreciate it very much if you would please answer this and explain to me why people are classed as animals. Thanking you, Sincerely, Carol Einstein's reply to the children of Westview school Dear Children: We should not ask "What is an animal" but "what sort of thing do we call an animal?" Well, we call something an animal which has certain characteristics: it takes nourishment, it descends from parents similar to itself, it grows, it moves by itself, it dies if its time has run out. That's why we call the worms, the chicken, the dog, the monkey an animal. What about us humans? Think about it in the above mentioned way and then decide for yourselves whether it is a natural thing to regard ourselves as animals. With kind regards, Albert Einstein From the book "Dear Professor Einstein" edited by Alice Calaprice (Prometheus Books, 2002) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Scintillate, scintillate Globule vivific Fain would I fathom Thy nature specific Loftily perched In the ether capacious Strongly resembling A gem carbonaceous. A polysyllabic version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" ----------------------------------------------------------------- "To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you." Isaac Newton ----------------------------------------------------------------- An interesting (and perhaps apocryphal too) story about the coining of "LASER" (for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation") is that the initial description of this physical concept was to be "Light Oscillation by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". Why the "oscillation" was replaced by "amplification" is amply clear from the two possible acronyms! J. Ramanand ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry." --Bertrand Russell, Study of Mathematics ----------------------------------------------------------------- "We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." Niels Bohr ----------------------------------------------------------------- "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Yogi Berra ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." Quote from Enrico Fermi ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!" Richard Feynman ----------------------------------------------------------------- Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. -- B. F. Skinner, New Scientist, 1964 May 21 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!), but 'That's funny ...' " Isaac Asimov ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Is biology too difficult for biologists? And what can physics, dealing with the simple and lawful, contribute to biology, which deals with the complex and diverse?" Per Bak, Nature 391, 652 - 653 (12 February 1998) ----------------------------------------------------------------- "It would be more descriptive, less boring, and historically more accurate, to replace the titles of Newton's first, second and third laws with the law of inertia (Descartes and Galileo, not Newton, first formulated it), Newton's law of motion, and the law of force pairs (or the law of interactions)." Art Hobson ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am." Samuel Johnson ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The surface is like a jigsaw puzzle for which the picture is not provided on the box cover. Dr. Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona, about the first pictures of Titan from the Cassini probe. November 1, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Theodosius Dobzhansky ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." Niels Bohr ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone." Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ programming language ----------------------------------------------------------------- "To speak algebraically: Mr. Mathews is execrable but Mr. Channing is (x+1)ecrable." Edgar Allen Poe ----------------------------------------------------------------- "To search thoroughly for the truth involves a searching of souls as well as of spectra." Lemaitre ----------------------------------------------------------------- "There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe that there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Richard Feynman, BBC Publications, 1965, p. 129. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Ut queant laxis resonare fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes." Latin hymn to St. John, whose first syllables led to the solfege "Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do", and to the word "gamut". Translation: "Free from guilt your servants' unclean lips, holy John, that they may be able to sing with clear voices the wonders of your life." ----------------------------------------------------------------- "There is no sadder sight in the world than to see a beautiful theory killed by a brutal fact." Thomas Huxley ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Oh, joy, rapture! I've got a brain." The Scarecrow in the movie "The Wizard of Oz", mangling the Pythagorean theorem. (One can easily show that no triangle can satisfy the Scarecrow's expression.) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Every biologist is, at heart, a chemist. And every chemist is, at heart, a physicist. And every physicist is, at heart, a mathematician. And every mathematician is, at heart a philosopher. And every philosopher is, at heart, a biologist." Anonymous ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." Albert Einstein ----------------------------------------------------------------- "What is beauty? The modern definition is that beauty is a quantum number that accounts for the existence and lifetime of the upsilon particle." ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto." Willaim James' definition of religion. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "There are at present fundamental problems in theoretical physics awaiting solution, e.g. the relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics and the nature of atomic nuclei (to be followed by more difficult ones such as the problem of life), the solution of which problems will presumably require a more drastic revision of our fundamental concepts than any that have gone before." Paul Dirac, 1931 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "If the human brain was so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." Emerson Pugh, IBM computer scientist. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." William Butler Yeats ----------------------------------------------------------------- When the poet Paul Valery once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one." Mentioned in Bill Bryson's book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything". ----------------------------------------------------------------- "When I write, I try to express difficult ideas in a simple way. In poetry, it is just the opposite." Paul Dirac ----------------------------------------------------------------- "It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without statistics" Andrejs Dunkels ----------------------------------------------------------------- "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Mark Twain ----------------------------------------------------------------- "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do." Lucille Ball ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Do only what only you can do." Advice to students from Edsger Wybe Dijkstra. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "An extreme example of this inadvertent duplication of definite articles is in the name of the Los Angeles site of prehistoric fossils of animals that had been stuck in tar pits. It's called The La Brea Tar Pits which would literally translate as The The Tar Tar Pits." -Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org) ----------------------------------------------------------------- A math poem by John Saxon: ((12 + 144 + 20 + (3 * 4^(1/2))) / 7) + (5 * 11) = 9^2 + 0 or in English: A Dozen, a Gross and a Score, plus three times the square root of four, divided by seven, plus five times eleven, equals nine squared and not a bit more. and an anonymous math poem: \int_(1)^(sqrt(3)) z^2 dz cos(3pi/9) = ln e^(1/3) or in English The integral of z squared dz from 1 to the square root of 3 times the cosine of 3 pi over 9 equals log of the cube root of e. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Better to have an approximate answer to the right question than a precise answer to the wrong question." John Tukey ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Congress had inaugurated a simple test to determine the approximate age at which the soul entered the body: the ability to formulate higher math like algebra. Up to then, it was only body, animal instincts and body, animal reflexes and responses to stimuli. Like Pavlov's dogs when they saw a little water seep in under the door of the Leningrade laboratory; they "knew" but were not human." Philip Dick in the short story "The Pre-Persons", in the collection "The Golden Man". ----------------------------------------------------------------- "He who understands a baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke" Darwin, 1838. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Richard Feynman ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Genius is only a great aptitude for patience" Buffon ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The Caliph Omar has been quoted as saying of the Library's holdings, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." 640 AD when Moslems took the city of Alexandria and burned the great library. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work." John von Neumann ----------------------------------------------------------------- "An attractive speculation from these juxtaposed observations is that the brain uses an enormous amount of extra capacity to do things that we have not yet learned how to do with computers." Thomas K. Landauer, from his paper "How much do people remember? Some estimates of the quantity of information in long-term memory", Cognitive Science 10:477-493 (1986). ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear." President of the Linnean Society, during year of 1858 in which Darwin and Wallace presented their ideas on evolution. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The guitar ... is like a lady, but to whom the saying "look at me but do not touch me" does not apply; and its rose is quite different from a real rose, since it will not wither however much it is touched with the hands, and moreover, if it is plucked by the hands of a skilled master, it will produce in them ever-new bouquets which delight the ear with their sonorous fragrances." Gaspar Sanz, from the Prologo to his Instruccion de musica sobre la guitarra espanola 1674/1675/1697 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense." Charles Darwin ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to the subject, it doesn't bother you anymore." Arnold Sommerfeld ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I am a millionaire in odd and useless facts" Charles Darwin ----------------------------------------------------------------- "For every complex problem there is a simple, easy to understand, wrong answer" Szent-Georgyi ----------------------------------------------------------------- "If it's green and it wiggles, it's Biology. If it stinks or explodes, it's Chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's Physics" Some poster ----------------------------------------------------------------- "How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality?" Albert Einstein ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Imagine an alien force, vastly more powerful than us, landing on Earth and demanding the value of R(5,5) or they will destroy our planet. In that case, we should marshal all our computers and our mathematicians and attempt to find the value. Suppose, instead, that they ask for R(6,6). In that case, we should attempt to destroy the aliens." Paul Erdos, about the difficulty of calculating Ramsey numbers R(m,n), the smallest number of people that guarantees that m will be mutual friends or n will be mutual strangers. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I am among those who think that science is a thing of great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not just a technician: he is also a child confronted with natural phenomena which dazzle him like a fairy tale." Marie Curie ----------------------------------------------------------------- "When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision." Lord Falkland (1610-1643) ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." Bertrand Russell ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Who would buy a digital camera with a fisheye lens and a 0.7 Kilo-Pixel chip, representing a whole hemisphere by a mere 26 x 26 pixels?" A. Borst, "Drosophila's View on Insect Vision", Current Biology 2009. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden; to cast a glance at the next advance in our science and at the secrets of its development during future centuries?" David Hilbert, 1900 address to the Second International Congress of Mathematicians when he outlined 23 problems confronting mathematics. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about." Douglas Adams in "Mostly Harmless", 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, but none in which a double positive makes a negative --- to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, "Yeah, yeah." ----------------------------------------------------------------- For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The first number not nameable in under ten words." No such thing can exist, this is a classic example of an English phrase that is nonsensical. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "When I read philosophy, I feel as if I'm trying to chew on something that isn't in my mouth" Einstein. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "For every complicated physical phenomenomon, there is a simple wrong explanation" Tommy Gold ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Omnis cellula e cellula" Rudolph Virchow, one of the great principles of biology. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose; ce que nous ignorons est immense." Pierre Simon de Laplace ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Nullius in verba" Motto of the Royal Society of London, dont' take anybody's word for it. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Now I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." Mnemonic for first 15 digits of pi: ----------------------------------------------------------------- "It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin ----------------------------------------------------------------- "In preparing for battle, I have found that planning is essential, but plans are useless." Dwight Eisenhower ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". Richard Feynman ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The trouble with physics is that its deepest pronouncements are totally incomprehensible to almost everybody except the deepest physicists, and while the pronouncements may well be absolutely true, they are all pretty useless if my aim is to understand Escherichia coli. In biology it is the detail that counts, and it counts because that is what natural selection had to accomplish for there to be anything at all. We want to know which genes are turned out and exactly where and precisely when. To view natural selection as a kind of handwaving process that seeks refuge in glorious generalities when it cannot solve problems, is the anthropomorphic reflection of our own insufficiencies." Sidney Brenner, Current Biology Vol 7 No 7 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes go bored?" Calvin and Hobbes =================================================================