When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute.
But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute -- and it's longer than any
hour. That's relativity.
-- Albert Einstein
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute.
But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute -- and it's longer than any
hour. That's relativity.
-- Albert Einstein
“Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, ”if it was so, it might be, and
if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!"
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
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
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what
the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be
replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another
theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on
weather forecasters.
-- Jean-Paul Kauffmann
The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar sort
of voluntary thinking.
-- William James
Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the
Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in
their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the
moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for they had a machine, a
dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect.
And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it
was all they had -- first they saved up all their atoms, then they put
them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit,
and everything was just fine ...
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
... we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection
by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.
I do not doubt that natural selection acted in building our oversized
brains -- and I am equally confident that our brains became large as
an adaptation for definite roles (probably a complex set of interacting
functions). But these assumptions do not lead to the notion, often
uncritically embraced by strict Darwinians, that all major capacities
of the brain must arise as direct products of natural selection.
-- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
The only person who always got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.
My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or
even that they were always wrong. Rather, I believe that science must be
understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of
robots programmed to collect pure information. I also present this view as
an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on
the alter of human limitations.
I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often
in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it. Galileo was not shown
the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had
threatened the Church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal
stability: the static world order with planets circling about a central
earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their lord. But the
Church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology. They had no choice; the
earth really does revolve about the sun.
-- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from
many it's research.
-- Wilson Mizner
The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
-- Harlan Ellison
And the French medical anatomist Etienne Serres really did argue that
black males are primitive because the distance between their navel and
penis remains small (relative to body height) throughout life, while
white children begin with a small separation but increase it during
growth -- the rising belly button as a mark of progress.
-- S.J. Gould, "Racism and Recapitulation"
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
-- George Wald
The tree of research must from time to time be refreshed with the blood
of bean counters.
-- Alan Kay
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
-- P. Erdos
How can you do 'New Math' problems with an 'Old Math' mind?
-- Charles Schulz
A sense of desolation and uncertainty, of futility, of the baselessness
of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavor, and a thirst for a life giving
water which seems suddenly to have failed, are the signs in conciousness
of this necessary reorganization of our lives.
It is difficult to believe that this state of mind can be produced by the
recognition of such facts as that unsupported stones always fall to the
ground.
-- J.W.N. Sullivan
A pain in the ass of major dimensions.
-- C.A. Desoer, on the solution of non-linear circuits
The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical
tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the
superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
-- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem.
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
-- Dawkins
Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two,
opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none.
-- Doug Larson
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social
sciences' is: some do, some don't.
-- Ernest Rutherford
The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner
The man officially credited with inventing the vacuum cleaner is
Hubert Cecil Booth. However, he got the idea from a man who almost
invented it.
In 1901 Booth visited a London music-hall. On the bill was an
American inventor with his wonder machine for removing dust from carpets.
The machine comprised a box about one foot square with a bag on top.
After watching the act -- which made everyone in the front six rows sneeze
-- Booth went round to the inventor's dressing room.
"It should suck not blow," said Booth, coming straight to the
point. "Suck?", exclaimed the enraged inventor. "Your machine just moves
the dust around the room," Booth informed him. "Suck? Suck? Sucking is
not possible," was the inventor's reply and he stormed out. Booth proved
that it was by the simple expedient of kneeling down, pursing his lips and
sucking the back of an armchair. "I almost choked," he said afterwards.
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Wernher von Braun
The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer
and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown
suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged,
I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not
dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the
quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors,
and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural
for them to despise science fiction.
-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Science Fiction"
Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic
formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific
mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned
with what ____does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been
so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further
here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically,
discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical,
and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent,
but each nonexisted in an entirely different way ...
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
All laws are simulations of reality.
-- John C. Lilly
Weinberg, as a young grocery clerk, advised the grocery manager to get
rid of rutabagas which nobody every bought. He did so. "Well, kid, that
was a great idea," said the manager. Then he paused and asked the killer
question, "NOW what's the least popular vegetable?"
Law: Once you eliminate your #1 problem, #2 gets a promotion.
-- Gerald Weinberg, "The Secrets of Consulting"