Tom's Favorite Quotes
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Living things are too beautiful
for there not to be a mathematics
that describes them.
--- Thomas SchneiderFrom the top of the hill there is no hill.
--- Thomas Schneider -
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
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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
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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."
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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 1I 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, 2001They 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, 1973All 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. 897It 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 SilvermanDOS 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 EinsteinHere'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.
googleI 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 21The 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-PittGot 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
google for
All Models are false. But some are still useful
-- Craig M. Pease
Click on the 'Cached' link to see it in a pretty format.-
"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."
-- Richard Feynman- Kornberg's Ten Commandments: Lessons from the Enzymology of DNA Replication
- Rely on enzymology to clarify biologic questions
- Trust the universality of biochemistry and the power of microbiology
- Do not believe something because you can explain it
- Do not waste clean thinking on dirty enzymes
- Do not waste clean enzymes on dirty substrates
- Depend on viruses to open windows
- Correct for extract dilution with molecular crowding
- Respect the personality of DNA
- Use revere genetics and genomics
- 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 PDF (slide 2)
- Ten commandments of enzymology, amended. Trends Biochem Sci. 2003 Oct;28(10):515-7. PMID: 14559177 (requires subscription) on line in Spain ...
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
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 fortuneBureaucrats 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 FeynmanMy 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 WATERMOTDThe best defense against logic is ignorance.
-- Unix fortuneThe 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.
From a video at CNN. CNN Special report. PDF.A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five.
-- Unix fortuneA 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 411A 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 fortuneThere 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 fortuneEven if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.
Mohandas Gandhi
The best defense against logic is ignorance.
-- Unix fortuneWhenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
-- Abraham Lincoln
-- Unix fortuneThe future is a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H. G. Wells
-- Unix fortuneChism's Law of Completion:
The amount of time required to complete a government project is precisely equal to the length of time already spent on it.
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 2008Biology 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, 1999Q: 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.
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 SchneiderDo 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 Feynmanall things are numbers
-- PythagorasThere 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 FeynmanIf you want creative workers,
give them enough time to play.
-- John Cleese, comic actor (1939- )
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http://www.reznor.com/~aj/quotes/
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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."
Schneider Lab
origin: 1997 January 17
updated:
2009 Jan 06