None at Williams College ever agrees with what I say.
"That I would grow suddenly obsessed with "football'' (the term used throughout the world to describe the sport that is called "soccer" in America) seemed no more likely than my becoming an astronaut"
Joe McGinniss, (The Miracle of Castel di Sangro)
I may change America for USA. Sometimes I wonder if James Monroe is around.
"When one does not understand, Joe, that is the time for the soft voice. Or, may be better, for no voice at all"
Joe McGinniss, (The Miracle of Castel DI Sangro)
"A model ... It can be a mental picture or even a story. Mathematical equations or creation myths can be models." Stephen Hawking
" we have to realize that developed-nations view of the human species is very narrow take on humanity. The majority of the human population does not live like this; more than half the people on earth have never spoken on a telephone." M. F. Small in "Scientific American's Ask the experts"
"South Africa gives me a perspective of what's real and what's not real. America (USA)'s very far from a state of natural existence. In America (USA), we're as concerned about who's pregnant on a TV show as we are about whether or not the temperature of the globe is going up."
Dave Matthews
"I maintain that there is a fairly sharp distinction between research and scholarship. Research means acquiring knowledge and understanding that has never before been acquired, while scholarship involves careful study of facts and concepts that have already been discovered"
Keith J. Laidler, (Acc. Chem. Res. 28, 187-192, 1995)
"Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In this simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong"
Richard Phillips Feynman
"After a few years' infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate I became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied seemed murky and inconsequential compared with the dazzling successes of physics and mathematics"
"Mathematics itself is never the explanation of anything - it is only the means by which we use one set of facts to explain another, and the language in which we express our explanation"
"Everyone agrees on how to use quantum mechanics, but there is serious disagreement about how to think about what we are doing when we use it."
S. Weinberg
"science treats factual reality, while religion treats human morality"
S. Gould
"One should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory"
A. Eddington
"The great
tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
T. H. Huxley
"Ever since we first noticed there is pattern in nature, we've been trying to explain it with myths, religion, and later mathematics and science." (In "Stephen Hawking. Quest for a theory of everything"
K. Ferguson.)
"It is difficult to imagine that a handful of residents of a small planet circling an insignificant star in a small galaxy have as their aim a complete understanding of the entire universe, a small speck of creation truly believing it is capable of comprehending the whole."
M. Gell-Mann
"Not knowing the Second Law of thermodynamics is like never read a work of Shakespeare." C. P. Snow
Check your eyes
