Tom's Favorite Quotes

• Living things are too beautiful
  for there not to be a mathematics
  that describes them.
  --- Thomas Schneider

  From the top of the hill there is no hill.
  --- Thomas Schneider

  Are you thinking outside the box? There is no box.
  --- Thomas Schneider

  Magical effects do not require miracles.
  --- Thomas Schneider

  Murphy's Law applied to Murphy's Law: If something can go wrong with Murphy's Law, it will.
  -- Tom Schneider 2020 Apr 05

• "NIH's mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability."
  --- NIH Mission

• Dudley's Criteria

  The proof may seem to be unsatisfying: each step is correct, and hence the conclusion is true, but it is not clear why the steps are there and where they came from. That is because there are at least eight levels of mathematical understanding, and it is hard for someone on a lower level to appreciate what goes on at a higher level. The levels are, I think:
  

  1. Being able to do arithmetic.
  
  2. Being able to substitute numbers in formulas.
  
  3. Given formulas, being able to get other formulas.
  
  4. Being able to understand the hypotheses and conclusions of theorems.
  
  5. Being able to understand the proofs of theorems, step by step.
  
  6. Being able to _really_ understand the proofs of theorems: that is, seeing why the proof is as it is, and comprehending the inwardness of the theorem and its relation to other theorems.
  
  7. Being able to generalize and extend theorems.
  
  8. Being able to see new relationships and discover and prove entirely new theorems.
  

  Those of us stuck on level 5 can no more understand the workings of a level 8 mind than a cow could understand calculus.

  Elementary Number Theory, 2nd ed, page 103-104, by Underwood Dudley. W. H. Freeman & co. 1969, second edition 1978 DUDLEY@DEPAUW.EDU

• For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first diligently to investigate the properties of things and establish them by experiment, and then to seek hypotheses to explain them. For hypotheses ought to be fitted merely to explain the properties of things and not attempt to predetermine them except in so far as they can be an aid to experiments.
  --- Isaac Newton Cambridge University, 1689. Principia, Motte's Translation Reviewed by Cajori, University of California Press (1934), p. 673. [published on page 226 of The Hydrogen Bond by Pimentel and McClellan, W. H. Freeman and Co, NY, 1960]

• 
  
  With a PC, I always felt limited by the software available.
  On Unix, I am limited only by my knowledge.
  --Peter J. Schoenster
  

  1997 Jan 16 from http://www.perl.com/perl

• Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

• Once the validity of this mode of thought has been recognized, the final results appear almost simple; any intelligent undergraduate can understand them without much trouble. But the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.
  - Albert Einstein, 1933

• About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!
  - Charles Darwin, September 18, 1861 (from Scientific American April 2001, p. 38.)

• If there are two ways to do an experiment, then do all three of them!
  --- Ilya Lyakhov
  2001 October 1

• I was awed by enzymes and fell instantly in love with them. I have since had love affairs with many enzymes (none as enduring as with DNA polymerase), but I have never met a dull or disappointing one.
  Arthur Kornberg, Remembering Our Teachers, J. Biol. Chem., Vol. 276, Issue 1, 3-11, January 5, 2001

• They submitted a manuscript to Science, only to have it turned down. One reviewer said it was obviously true and therefore trivial; the other said that it was obviously wrong.
  James F. Crow Genetics, Vol. 154, 955-956, March 2000 Thomas H. Jukes (1906-1999)

• dS >= dq/T
  The heat of the moment
  is the coin of the realm.
  --TDS, 2002 July

• ... adaptation has been achieved by the process, already mentioned, which hinges on the gaining of information by means of genetic change and natural selection, as well as on the storing of knowledge in the code of the chain molecules in the genome.
  -- Konrad Lorenz, Nobel Prize lecture, 1973

• All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
  -- Gandalf J.R.R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring, Second chapter, "The Shadow of the Past",
  just after the Elvish writing and poem that describes the One Ring.

• "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less."
  --- Humpty Dumpty (Lewis carroll), Through the Looking Glass

• Never ever let your gun
  pointed be at anyone.
  That it may unloaded be
  matters not the least to me.
  -- from Victor Smetacek, Nature 421, 27 Feb 2003 p. 897

• It has been said that tackling a new scientific problem is like going into a darkened room. First you fall over the furniture, then you collide with other people in the room; arguments might develop. With time things settle down, as you learn where most of the furniture is and don't fall over so often. Eventually someone finds the light switch and everything becomes obvious. --- John Pendry
  (Nature 2003 May 1;423(6935):22-3 Optics: Positively negative.)

• "That's the problem with these things [computers], they do what you tell them, not what you meant to tell them."
  --- Danielle Needle
  2003 October 10

• "I was asked by a student what ethical standards should be adopted by life scientists. I could immediately think of two prescriptions. The first, common to all scientists, is to tell the truth. The second is to stand up for all humanity."
  Sydney Brenner
  ("Humanity as the model system." Science. 2003 Oct 24;302(5645):533. or google)

• "Deep snow is much deeper than very deep snow."
  - Michael Yarmolinsky, from his father, 1991 Aug 1
  [This was told to me in the context of using the word `very' in writing.]

• "It [evolution] was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
  - Douglas Adams
  DOUGLAS ADAMS (1952 - 2001)
  Interview with David Silverman

• DOS is a Beetle, much used, familiar, and clunky. Unix is an F-18.
  - Chris Alfeld.
  See more excellent quotes collected by Peter Alfeld.

• Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
  - Martin Luther King Jr., "Strength to Love", 1963
  http://www.rallyofone.org/

• "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
  - Albert Einstein

• Here's a world that is livable for all people, if you use your head.
  - Herbert A. Schneider

• "The book of nature is written in mathematical characters."
  - Galileo Galilei, 1623.
  google

• I judge organizations by their parking lots, and at NASA in those days, the parking lot was full early in the morning, the parking lot was full late in the evening.
  - Michael Collins
  CNN 2004 July 21

• The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
  -- Alan Ashley-Pitt

• Got Mole problems?
  Call Avogadro 6.02 x 10^23
  

• The same reviewer didn't add to his credibility when he pointed out that I hadn't "defined little d in the fraction dT/dA" (the left side of Eq. 5 in the derivation above), and, even if I had, it should be canceled from the fraction.
  -- Ed Stephan
  The Division of Territory in Society Chapter 8.

• You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.
  -- Unix fortune

• "Back off man, I'm a scientist." - Ghostbusters

• The_Knack

• All models are wrong but some are useful
  George Box
  

• • • "And in those days one of the possible theories that were proposed was that what made the planets go around was that there were behind them, here, located invisible angels which were beating their wings and driving the thing forward. As you'll see, that this theory is now modified ... [laughter]"
      feynman10.au feynman10.wav

  • "You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I do not know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask 'why we are here?' and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit if I can figure it out then I go into something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't have ... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which it the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. "

    Audio, starting at "I have approximate answers ..."
    • feynman8a.au
    • feynman8a.wav
    • youtube video
  
  -- Richard Feynman
• Kornberg's Ten Commandments: Lessons from the Enzymology of DNA Replication
  1. Rely on enzymology to clarify biologic questions
  2. Trust the universality of biochemistry and the power of microbiology
  3. Do not believe something because you can explain it
  4. Do not waste clean thinking on dirty enzymes
  5. Do not waste clean enzymes on dirty substrates
  6. Depend on viruses to open windows
  7. Correct for extract dilution with molecular crowding
  8. Respect the personality of DNA
  9. Use reverse genetics and genomics
  10. Employ enzymes as unique reagents
  • Ten commandments: lessons from the enzymology of DNA replication. Kornberg A. J Bacteriol. 2000 Jul;182(13):3613-8. pubmedcentral
  • Ten commandments of enzymology, amended. Trends Biochem Sci. 2003 Oct;28(10):515-7. PMID: 14559177 (requires subscription)

• Dealing with failure is easy: work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: you've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
  -- Unix fortune

• "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
  -- Albert Einstein
  

• "When in doubt, tell the truth."
  -- Mark Twain

• A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly: "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.
  -- Unix fortune

• Bureaucrats cut red tape -- lengthwise.
  -- Unix fortune

• "Imagination is more important than knowledge. The important thing is to not stop questioning."
  -- Albert Einstein

• "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which 'are' there."
  -- Richard Feynman

• My motto is to end oppression with education.
  -- Mukhtar Mai
  CNN, 2005 Nov 4

• "Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams) "365,365,365,365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365. He [ten-year-old Truman Henry Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in an agony, until, in not more than one minute, said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!" An electronic computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be as much fun to watch.
  -- James R. Newman (The World of Mathematics)

• "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."
  --- from the Talmud
  (google)

• Ogden's Law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.

•          EARTH
       smog  |   bricks
   AIR  --  mud  --  FIRE
  soda water |   tequila
           WATER
  

  MOTD

• The best defense against logic is ignorance.
  -- Unix fortune

• The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interrruptions -- the door that's slammed shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door.
  -- Martin Luther King Jr., found in King's briefcase on his trip to Memphis, Tennesee, in 1968.
  CNN Special report. PDF.

• A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five.
  -- Unix fortune

• A true scientist is working at the very limit of his own knowledge, and therefore half of the time he is feeling incompetent. Our job is to feel incompetent 50% of the time, by pushing the boundary. When we are feeling completely comfortable and competent, we are not doing our job.
  -- Carlos Bustamante BioTechniques, April 2007, Volume 42, Number 4: p 411

• A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary. Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a round tuit now has no excuse for further procrastination.
  -- Unix fortune

• "We'll cross out that bridge when we come back to it later."
  -- Unix fortune

• "All these other animation groups want to be like Pixar, but they steal the wrong things from them. They don't steal the actual process, which is take your time, hold out for the good stuff, which is kind of what 'Ratatouille' is all about. Don't just stuff yourself with bland garbage. Wait for the good stuff."
  -- Patton Oswalt
  CNN 2007 Jul 1 (Link broken by 2007 Dec 20)

• Q: How do you shoot a blue elephant?
  A: With a blue-elephant gun.
  
  Q: How do you shoot a pink elephant?
  A: Twist its trunk until it turns blue, then shoot it with
        a blue-elephant gun.
  -- Unix fortune

• There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.
  -- Richard Davisson
  -- Unix fortune

• Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.
  Mohandas Gandhi
  

• Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
  -- Abraham Lincoln
  -- Unix fortune

• The future is a race between education and catastrophe.
  -- H. G. Wells
  -- Unix fortune
  An direct quote is:

  Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
  -- H. G. Wells, "The Outline of History", chapter. 41, 1920

• The grand Question which every naturalist ought to have before him when dissecting a whale or classifying a mite, a fungus or an infusorian is "What are the Laws of Life"
  -- Charles Darwin
  B Notebook B229

• "if something's really important, you keep after it, regardless of what other people think."
  -- Judah Folkman
  Optimism personified Science 319(5862) 25 January 2008

• Biology is rapidly becoming a science that demands more intense mathematical and physical analysis than biologists have been accustomed to, and such analysis will be required to understand the workings of cells.
  -- Harold Varmus
  The Impact of Physics on Biology & Medicine, Plenary Talk, Centennial Meeting of the American Physical Society Atlanta March 22, 1999

• Q: What lies on the bottom of the ocean and twitches?
  A: A nervous wreck.
  -- Unix fortune

• • The writing implement is more potent than the claymore.
  • All articles that coruscate with resplendence are not truly auriferous.
  • When there are visible vapors having the prevenience in ignited carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration.
  • Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted.
  • A plethora of individuals wither expertise in culinary techniques vitiated the potable concoction produced by steeping certain coupestibles.
  • The person presenting the ultimate cachinnation possesses thereby the optimal cachinnation.
  • Eleemosynary deeds have their initial incidence intramurally.
  -- Unix fortune

• Four stages of acceptance: (J.B.S. Haldane, Journal of Genetics #58, 1963)
  i) this is worthless nonsense;
  ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;
  iii) this is true, but quite unimportant;
  iv) I always said so.

• 29. ... It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible. When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the whole thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew about it all along. I have not collected the above historical information with that same purpose in mind....
  --- Dennis Ritchie
  This appeared as footnote 29 in "A Treatise on Telegraphs" by A. N. Edelcrantz, a councillor to the Swedish king, and was written in 1796. The translation to English was arranged by Gerard Holtzmann.

• "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."
  -- George Bernard Shaw
  

• How do you turn wood into glass?
  Leave the door ajar.
  --- Tom Schneider

• Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  see: Charles Elachi: The story of the Mars Rovers

• "What I cannot create, I do not understand."
  -- Richard Feynman

• all things are numbers
  -- Pythagoras

• There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.
  -- Pythagoras
  ("from the preface of the book entitled Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie (1961)".)

• "People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding"
  -- Richard Feynman

• If you want creative workers,
  give them enough time to play.
  -- John Cleese, comic actor (1939- )
  texhax

• A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
  Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
  A: Top-posting.
  Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

• "We'll restore science to its rightful place ..."
  -- Barack Obama, 20 January 2009
  Inaugural Address

• No, his mind is not for rent
  To any God or government.
  Always hopeful, yet discontent,
  He knows changes aren't permanent,
  But change is.
  from 'Tom Sawyer' by Rush
  search

• If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress.
  -- Frederick Douglass, 1857
  google

• The first thing needed is the rectification of names.
  -- Confucius, Analects 13:3
  Nature Chemical Biology 5, 521 - 525 (2009); The Rectification of Names

• A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
  -- Doug Linder, Unix fortune

• A CREDO
  "Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we know: that man is here for the sake of other men . . . above all, for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond-of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received."
  -- Albert Einstein

• "Science doesn't work on 2 year cycles, you all know that."
  -- Francis Collins
  NIH Director 2009 Aug 17
  NIH All-Hands Town Meeting with Dr. Collins. An NIH all-hands town meeting in the Main Auditorium of the Natcher Building, on Monday, August 17--Dr. Collins' first day as NIH Director, NIH videocast.

• The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't.
  -- Ernest Rutherford

• Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action From: TED, May 04, 2010.

  `Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers -- and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.'

• 1970 - Niklaus Wirth creates Pascal, a procedural language. Critics immediately denounce Pascal because it uses "x := x + y" syntax instead of the more familiar C-like "x = x + y". This criticism happens in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
  -- James Iry

• Lewis's Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever.
  -- Unix fortune

•  

  All energy is only borrowed, and one day you have to give it back. -- Avatar

• One day this guy is finally fed up with his middle-class existence and decides to do something about it. He calls up his best friend, who is a mathematical genius. "Look," he says, "do you suppose you could find some way mathematically of guaranteeing winning at the race track? We could make a lot of money and retire and enjoy life." The mathematician thinks this over a bit and walks away mumbling to himself.
  A week later his friend drops by to ask the genius if he's had any success. The genius, looking a little bleary-eyed, replies, "Well, yes, actually I do have an idea, and I'm reasonably sure that it will work, but there a number of details to be figured out.
  After the second week the mathematician appears at his friend's house, looking quite a bit rumpled, and announces, "I think I've got it! I still have some of the theory to work out, but now I'm certain that I'm on the right track."
  At the end of the third week the mathematician wakes his friend by pounding on his door at three in the morning. He has dark circles under his eyes. His hair hasn't been combed for many days. He appears to be wearing the same clothes as the last time. He has several pencils sticking out from behind his ears and an almost maniacal expression on his face. "WE CAN DO IT! WE CAN DO IT!!" he shrieks. "I have discovered the perfect solution!! And it's so EASY! First, we assume that horses are perfect spheres in simple harmonic motion..."

  --- Unix fortune

• "First they ignore you,
  then they laugh at you,
  then they fight you,
  then you win."
  -- Mahatma Gandhi
  (According to the wikipedia entry on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi it is disputed that he said this.)

• "Estimated amount of glucose used by an adult human brain each day, expressed in M&Ms: 250"
  -- Harper's Index (mutt messages)

• The astronomer Francesco Sizi, a contemporary of Galileo, argues that Jupiter can have no satellites:

  "There are seven windows in the head, two nostrils, two ears, two eyes, and a mouth; so in the heavens there are two favorable stars, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From which and many other similar phenomena of nature such as the seven metals, etc., which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. [...]"

  "Moreover, the satellites are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth and therefore would be useless and therefore do not exist.

  -- Unix fortune

• It is never safe for a biologist to announce a discovery if he has not read and mastered The Origin of Species.

  -- Keith (1928). Introduction to Everyman Edition of C. Darwin, The Origin of Species.
  quoted by J. L. Harper, A Darwinian Approach to Plant Ecology, July 1967, Volume 55, 2, Journal of Ecology, 247-270. Quote is on p. 268-269.
  google; PDF; JSTOR PDF.

• A manager went to his programmers and told them: "As regards to your work hours: you are going to have to come in at nine in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon." At this, all of them became angry and several resigned on the spot.
  
  So the manager said: "All right, in that case you may set your own working hours, as long as you finish your projects on schedule." The programmers, now satisfied, began to come in at noon and work to the wee hours of the morning.
  -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

• There was a young man from LeDoux,
  Whose limericks stopped at line two.
  
  There was a young man from Verdunne.
  
  [Actually, there are three limericks in this series, the third one is about some guy named Nero. If anyone has a copy of it, please mail it to "fortune". Ed.]
  
  -- Unix fortune

• What's in a name? In the case of Shannon's measure the naming was not accidental. In 1961 one of us (Tribus) asked Shannon what he had thought about when he had finally confirmed his famous measure. Shannon replied: "My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'
  -- M. Tribus and E. C. McIrvine, Energy and Information, Sci. Am., 225, 3, 179-188, September, 1971. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0971-179
  This is the origin of one of the many pitfalls in information theory, confusing information, uncertainty and entropy.

• "Nothing that results from human progress is achieved with unanimous consent. And those who are enlightened before the others are condemned to pursue that light in spite of others."
  -- Christopher Columbus

• Furthermore, if we send something by car, it's a shipment... but if we send it by ship, it's cargo.
  -- Unix fortune
  That reminds me that we park our cars in the driveway and we drive on a parkway.

• And now, a message for the sponsor Marshall Nirenberg was a basic scientist. His discoveries apply to all of biology. The mechanistic understanding he provided informs all modern thinking about health and disease. I hope you have all been convinced by our data and their interpretation. If so, you can see that study of experimental evolution in yeast (pure basic science) sheds light on the mechanisms that underlie oncogenesis and tumor progression. As a basic scientist, I occasionally made contributions that found use in medicine. I never knew in advance which projects, ideas and results would be useful. I doubt that Marshall Nirenberg did either. Basic scientists do what we do in pursuit of scientific understanding. It's not that we don't care, we just can't predict (nobody can) the solution to most problems until more is understood. Pursuing that understanding is our essential role. He continues: "Understanding is what we do. My plea is that the NIH needs to understand this too. And that there has to be a balance between basic science, which gives you understanding and something that will cure Mrs Joneses' cancer tomorrow. It may not be possible to find something for Mrs Joneses' cancer tomorrow by working on Mrs Joneses' cancer. We might have to be a little more subtle. Subtle is the lord but he is not malicious, right? The message for the sponsor is if we starve basic science, there'll be nothing left to translate. -- Dr. David Botstein, Princeton University Evolution and Cancer lecture at NIH 2012 Jan 04 at 46:38.

  It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
  -- Richard Feynman, 1964
  YouTube: Feynman Chaser - The Key to Science
  NPR: The Essence Of Science Explained In 63 Seconds
  Contrast this to the Crick quote below!

  `As Francis Crick said: ``A theory that fits all the facts is bound to be wrong, as some of the facts will be wrong.'' '
  -- Lewis Wolpert, Estimating Popper's impact, Nature, 360: 204, 1992.
  Contrast this to the Feynman quote above!

  "You may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies: 'march to the sound of the guns.' In science the exact opposite is the case: march away from the sound of the guns! March away from the sounds of the guns. Observe from a distance, but do not join the fray. Make a fray of your own. Once you have settled on a specialty and a profession you can love, and you've secured opportunity, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study enough to become an expert."
  -- E.O. Wilson's Five Principles for Budding Scientists The Atlantic Home, Apr 12 2012, 1:07 PM ET
  TED talk: E.O. Wilson: Advice to young scientists, published 2012 Jun 25

  We pause to assure the reader that there is nothing mysterious about n-dimensional space. A point in n-dimensional space Rⁿ is simply a string of n real numbers ...
  -- J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane, "Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups" Springer-Verlag, third edition, New York, ISBN 0-387-98585-9, 1998, page 3.
  http://neilsloane.com/doc/splag.html

  L2TABU, like all rules, exists solely for the guidance of the wise and the blind obedience of the foolish.
  -- Philip Taylor
  texhax posting (See: Obsolete packages and commands.)

  "There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life."
  -- Alain de Botton

  Nos saltare rotundum per anulum et aestimatis,
  Sedet in mediis cognoscit tamen occultus.
  --- Robert Frontinus
  translation ("of it" should be "and"). The original poem, which I have permission to republish, is:

  We dance round in a ring and suppose,
  But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
  ---Robert Frost

  In my opinion we are in a dangerous age of overspecialization. To me the danger of this period is not primarily that we are studying very special problems that the development of science has forced us to go into, but rather that we are in great danger of finding our outlook so limited that we may fail to see the bearing of important ideas because they have been formulated in what our organization of science has decreed to be alien territory.
  -- Norbert Wiener, 1956. What is Information Theory? IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2(2) 48

  Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus you get strawberries.
  -- Ron Finley A guerilla gardener in South Central LA

  "Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds."
  -- J. Finnegan, USC. (Unix fortune)

  Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.
  -- Max Planck

  "We're not talking about the same thing," he said. "For you the world is weird because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must accept responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it."
  -- Don Juan
  JOURNEY TO IXTLAN -- THE LESSONS OF DON JUAN

  If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
  -- Nikola Tesla
  (From Amazing Resonance Experiment! by brusspup)

  Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
  -- Galileo Galilei

  Have you started working on your Nobel lecture? Do you have a topic in mind?
  
  That's a good question. The ceremony is scheduled for early December in Stockholm. I have not started working on my Nobel Lecture, which is a special lecture of more than average importance. This week there has been a lot of interest from the press. I trust that it will go away by next week as we become fish wrap.
  --- James E. Rothman
  (secondary link)

  Great science has always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
  (This is a variant of a quote by Einstein.)

  Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy!
  -- Han Solo
  google search, clip

  Applications to physics of the elementary Pythagorean theorem abound, and point to a useful lesson: fancy mathematics does not necessarily underly deep physics.
  -- J. B. Clarage. The Pythagorean Roots of Introductory Physics. Sci & Educ, 22:527-542, 2013.
  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-012-9553-6,
  DOI 10.1007/s11191-012-9553-6

  modem, adj: Up-to-date, new-fangled, as in "Thoroughly Modem Millie." An unfortunate byproduct of kerning.
  -- linux fortune

  A Fred Sanger would not survive today's world of science. With continuous reporting and appraisals, some committee would note that he published little of import between insulin in 1952 and his first paper on RNA sequencing in 1967 with another long gap until DNA sequencing in 1977. He would be labeled as unproductive, and his modest personal support would be denied. We no longer have a culture that allows individuals to embark on long-term-and what would be considered today extremely risky-projects.
  -- Sydney Brenner
  Science 17 January 2014: Vol. 343 no. 6168 p. 262 Retrospective Frederick Sanger (1918-2013)

  The 6 Ps:
  Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance
  -- Mick Dodge Meet the Legend, 18:03

  The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
  -- A. Einstein and L. Infeld, The Evolution of Physics. NEW YORK: SIMON & SCHUSTER, 1938. p.92
  (google, Getzels)

  "To make this journey we'll need imagination, but imagination alone is not enough because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine. This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules. Test ideas by experiment and observation, build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads and question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours."
  -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
  Cosmos: A SPACETIME ODYSSEY 1:20 Standing Up In The Milky Way. First episode of the new Cosmos. This link will (probably) only last 54 days from 2014 Mar 11.

  There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.
  -- Unix fortune
  

  is it ok to say I'm a "scientist" rather than a "graduate student" so I don't have to scramble around and explain to people that I don't really take classes, only know it's spring break when I don't have to weave between latte-carrying pedestrians in leggings, and I can only graduate when 5 people say I can?
  -- Kathy Michels

  Yes! and I would say you were probably a scientist when you were a little girl with perhaps muddy or dangerous stories to tell about that ... I'd like to hear those stories! Being a scientist is having a curious frame of mind and looking into the world to find answers. You don't need letters after your name to be a scientist.
  -- Tom Schneider

  (posted with permission, 2014 Mar 30)

  "Science requires openness to flourish."
  -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
  Cosmos Hiding in the Light Season: 1 Episode: 5

  It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
  -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia

  ALL THIS IS A DREAM. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these experiment is the best test of such consistency.
  -- Michael Faraday
  wikiquote. From the end of Cosmos season 1 number 10, The Electric Boy

  Weed's Axiom:
  Never ask two questions in a business letter. The reply will discuss the one in which you are least interested and say nothing about the other.
  -- Unix fortune

  "Science is made up with facts as a house is made from stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house."
  -- Poincaré, Hypotheses in Physics (1952)
  The NEURONS and NEURAL SYSTEM: a 21st CENTURY PARADIGM, James T. Fulton 8SignalGen-olfaction.pdf

  "In order to understand any part of nature, one must have both experimental data and a theory for interpreting the data and predicting new data."
  -- Shepherd, Outline of a Theory of Olfaction, 2005
  The NEURONS and NEURAL SYSTEM: a 21st CENTURY PARADIGM, James T. Fulton 8SignalGen-olfaction.pdf

  "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science."
  -- James Clerk Maxwell
  Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance

  "A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations."
  -- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

  In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period.
  -- Erwin Schrodinger
  google, wired

  Science by press release is not good enough. When you see a press release from anybody, you've got to say "Show me the data, what is the data behind this press release". And we do that in science by publication. Publication means that we write up our results fully and we make all the relevant information available. We do not hide it away in proprietary databases. We show what people need to know. In the case of papers about sequence that means the sequence has to be put in public databases. Otherwise, in my opinion it doesn't count as proper publication. We may talk more about that at the reception but um I think it is a very important point to consider and it goes far beyond genomics, the tendency to make excuses for not fully releasing data on grounds of wanting some sort of intellectual property rights. We have to be aware of this otherwise our communication breaks down.
  -- Nobel Lecture by John E. Sulston

  "As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence. The strength and the limits of man's intelligence may remain unaltered; and yet the instruments that he uses will increase and improve, the language that fixes and determines his ideas will acquire greater breadth and precision and, unlike mechanics where an increase of force means a decrease of speed, the methods that lead genius to the discovery of truth increase at once the force and the speed of its operations."
  -- Marquis de Condorcet
  izquotes.com
  Original source: The Mind of the Science Denier, Skeptic Magazine. (Note: this occurs repeatedly with my theory - Gaussians, multiple Gaussians! ... simplifies to spheres in ccmm ...)

  Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
  -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

  "When you try to look up scientific documents sometimes the source that you are going to will only allow you to read the abstract if you can find it at all or you need to log in. Science is not doing themselves any favors by making the information difficult to get, it's already difficult to understand, for most people; don't make it hard to find.
  -- AronRa, The Failures of Creationism

  "Basic science is the best way to push beyond the science that we know today."
  -- Dr. Joram Piatigorsky
  NEI Scientist Emeritus's Debut Novel Probes Jellyfish Eyes By Kathryn DeMott, NIH Record, May 8, 2015 Vol. LXVII, No. 10

  If he once again pushes up his sleeves in order to compute for 3 days and 3 nights in a row, he will spend a quarter of an hour before to think which principles of computation shall be most appropriate.
  Voltaire, "Diatribe du docteur Akakia"

  Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
  --- Thomas Henry Huxley, Letter to Charles Kingsley, September 23, 1860
  Great Thoughts, Revised and Updated

  Writing should be:

  1. correct
  2. consistent
  3. complete
  4. clear
  5. concise

  
  -- unknown (modified by TDS). Google: concise complete clear

  For me, I am driven by two main philosophies:
  know more today about the world than I knew yesterday
  and
  lessen the suffering of others.
  You'd be surprised how far that gets you.
  -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
  search

  "If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough immortality for me."
  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, (1995) "Introducing a course on calculi" (EWD 1213).

  Biological research is in crisis, ... Technology gives us the tools to analyse organisms at all scales, but we are drowning in a sea of data and thirsting for some theoretical framework with which to understand it.
  -- Sydney Brenner
  Life's code script Nature, 482: 461, 2012. PMID 22358811

  There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C. A. R. Hoare (Unix fortune)

  This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
  -- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, search

  Basic research - Think outside the box!
  * A major point of this lecture is a warning to young scientists --- Do not get trapped in the dogma of the day!
  * The history of muscle research is filled with examples of how the field did not move forward because of dogma that the muscle community could not let go of.
  -- James Spudich (Stanford) 1: A brief history of muscle biology 1864-1969

  "You have to be living what you're doing, thinking of the problem in the shower or when stopped at a red light; immerse yourself in the knowledge of a field," he said. You also have "to define the problem you're trying to solve in just one sentence, and pursue it with a laser-like focus."
  -- Steven A. Rosenberg
  Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D. An Immunotherapy Pioneer Tells All

  The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.
  -- Carl Sagan
  google

  We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
  -- Niels Bohr to Wolfgang Pauli

  Broadly speaking I want to suggest that geometry is that part of mathematics in which visual thought is dominant whereas algebra is that part in which sequential thought is dominant. This dichotomy is perhaps better conveyed by the words "insight" versus "rigour" and both play an essential role in real mathematical problems.
  -- What Is Geometry? The 1982 Presidential Address, Michael Atiyah, The Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 66, No. 437 (Oct., 1982), pp. 179-184

  It is not the critic who counts, or how the strong man stumbled, or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, and who spends himself in a worthy cause, and if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that he'll never be with those cold and timid souls who never know either victory or defeat.
  -- Teddy Roosevelt
  google goodreads mentalfloss

  Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal -- if you don't use your thumbs.
  -- Tom Lehrer
  (search)

  "The best of science is also a long, slow passive-aggressive argument."
  -- zefrank1, "True Facts: Leafhoppers and Friends", Nov 5, 2019

  "One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you are right but not enough about the subject to know you're wrong."
  -- Neil Degrasse Tyson

  "The Earth is round, gasoline is flammable, and vaccines are safe and effective, All the rest are dangerous lies."
  -- Roberto Burioni

  You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great
  -- Zig Ziglar

  There's a kind of indignation I know well, when someone feels that the wrong done them has been unrecognized, and a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story.
  -- Rebecca Solnit

  "Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth."
  -- Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth

  But what Mendel did was to experiment with may be half a dozen different plant species but then decided to focus on one where he seemed to be able to make sense of what he was observing. I mention this because biology is complex and if you are to make sense of the complexity, it helps greatly if you study biological material which actually you can make sense of. Because having made sense of it you can perhaps supply those ideas and principles to more complex situations and you could call it cheating in a way cause you just focus on what you can make sense of. But if you don't do that then you can never make sense of the complexity that we're looking at.
  -- What is Life? Sir Paul Nurse - 2020 James Martin Memorial Lecture Mar 6, 2020 at Oxford Martin School (18:12)

  It was an odd jest of fate that a circumstance which on former occasions I had found unpleasant, namely, the lack of interest of my colleagues in the direction taken by my investigations, now turned to be an outright boon. While a host of outstanding physicists worked on the problem of spectral energy distribution, both from the experimental and theoretical aspect, every one of them directed his efforts solely toward exhibiting the dependence of radiation on the temperature. On the other hand, I suspected that the fundamental connection lies in the dependence of entropy on energy. As the significance of the concept of entropy had not yet come to be fully appreciated, nobody paid any attention to the method adopted by me, and I could work out my calculation completely at my leisure, with absolute thoroughness, without fear of interference or competition.
  -- Max Planck quoted in the book: "Promoting the Planck Club How Defiant Youth, Irreverent Researchers and Liberated Universities Can Foster Prosperity Indefinitely by Donald W. Braben, 2014. See Boltzmann's Entropy Equation: A History from Clausius to Planck Jan 20, 2020 by Kathy Loves Physics & History. The quote comes from the book by Max Planck "Scientific Autobiography and other papers", page 38. (search for jest in the book) You can borrow the book online from archive.org.

  "the paper was like rejected 6-7 times, god knows, but we were very persistent"
  -- Shafi Goldwasser, Nov 2, 2020

  What is the scientific method?
  I'll tell you.
  Do whatever it takes
  to not fool yourself
  into thinking something is
  true that is not,
  or to thinking something
  is not true that is.
  Whatever it takes that is the
  scientific method period."
  -- Nov 28, 2023 Neil deGrasse Tyson (Facebook posting about this.)

  Entropy
  The practical measure of the random element which can increase in the universe but can never decrease is called entropy. Measuring by entropy is the same as measuring by the chance explained in the last paragraph, only the unmanageably large numbers are transformed (by a simple formula) into a more convenient scale of reckoning. Entropy continually increases. We can, by isolating parts of the world and postulating rather idealised conditions in our problems, arrest the increase, but we cannot turn it into a decrease. That would involve something much worse than a violation of an ordinary law of Nature, namely, an improbable coincidence. The law that entropy always increases---the second law of thermodynamics---holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. This exaltation of the second law is not unreasonable. There are other laws which we have strong reason to believe in, and we feel that a hypothesis which violates them is highly not confront us as a paralysing array of figures, whereas the chance against a breach of the second law (i.e. against a decrease of the random element) can be stated in figures which are overwhelming.
  --- THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD, SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON, 1958, page 74 (n93)

  ---

  
  • Excerpted from "Cutting Up An Ox", from "The Way of Chuang Tzu", translated and edited by Thomas Merton, New Directions Press, 1965.

    Prince Wen Hui's cook speaks:

    "A good cook needs a new chopper
    Once a year--he cuts.
    A poor cook needs a new one
    Every month--he hacks!

    "I have used this same cleaver
    Ninteen years.
    It has cut up
    A thousand oxen.
    Its edge is as keen
    As if newly sharpened.

    'There are spaces in the joints;
    The blade is thin and keen:
    When this thinness
    Finds that space
    There is all the room you need!
    It goes like a breeze!
    Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years
    As if newly sharpened!

    "True, there are sometimes
    Tough joints. I feel them coming,
    I slow down, I watch closely,
    Hold back, barely move the blade,
    And whump! the part falls away
    Landing like a clod of earth.

    "Then I withdraw the blade,
    I stand still
    And let the joy of the work
    Sink in.
    I clean the blade
    And put it away."

  • Technique?" said the programmer turning from his terminal, "What I follow is Tao -- beyond all technique! When I first began to program I would see before me the whole problem in one mass. After three years I no longer saw this mass. Instead, I used subroutines. But now I see nothing. My whole being exists in a formless void. My senses are idle. My spirit, free to work without plan, follows its own instinct. In short, my program writes itself. True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I then compile the program. I sit still and let the joy of the work fill my being. I close my eyes for a moment and then log off.

    --- Unix fortune

  ---

  Other quote pages:
  fortunes
  firefrog
  Zen stories
  Quotations by Richard Hamming
  Werblin's Laws
  Motd - Message of the Day
  http://www.reznor.com/~aj/quotes/
  https://www.stat.wisc.edu/quotes
  http://www.quotesamigo.com/ general quotes

  
  
  
  Schneider Lab
  origin: 1997 January 17
  updated: 2024 Dec 01 Arthur Eddington on entropy