Quotations
E.S. Phinney's collection of quotations somewhat relevant to
theoretical astrophysics.
Magnetic fields are to astrophysics
as sex is to psychology.
- H.C. van der Hulst
Man [after the Garden of Eden] pursued many useful occupations,
differing from each other; and some were, and are, more theoretical
than others; they could not all be alike, since theory is the most
worthy....
It is not without the impulse of a lofty spirit that some are moved
to enter this profession, attractive to them through natural enthusiasm.
- Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, Il Libro dell'Arte (1437)
[Translation Daniel V.Thompson Jr. (1933) Yale University Press;
Dover reprint 1953]
A `prototype' is conventionally described as possessing most of the
characteristics or the essential nature of some class. In contrast,
astronomers much more commonly use `prototype' as we do here,
instead to mean `frequently observed' and/or `bright'.
- footnote in Thronson et al 1991, MNRAS 252, 543
Fred Hoyle: "A star is basically a pretty simple structure."
Professor R.O. Redman's response: "You'd look pretty simple too, Fred,
at a distance of ten parsecs."
- colloquium exchange quoted by Peter Fellgett in Observatory,
115, #1125, (1995 April) page 93, and by A. Beer in
Vistas in Astronomy, 1, 247 (1960).
Nature is not malicious, but it has a sense of humour.
- H.E. Schwarz, quoted in The Symbiotic Phenomenon, eds
J. Mikolajewska et al (Dordrecht: Kluwer), page 355.
Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory;
then you can borrow money of them.
-Mark Twain, The Bee
After one of Dirac's rare seminar lectures to the graduate students
at Cambridge, the moderator stepped to the podium and said Prof. Dirac
would be happy to entertain questions. Immediately a hand went up
in the audience and the individual stated in a loud voice: "Prof. Dirac,
I must say I don't understand Equation 4."
Everyone sat quietly anticipating a response from the eminent man, but
none came. Dirac remained motionless in his chair staring straight
ahead. After a full minute had passed, the moderator became
noticeably nervous and inquired, "Prof. Dirac, would you care to answer
the gentleman's question?"
"That was no question," replied Dirac dryly. "That was a simple statement
of fact."
-reported by William L. Davidson in Science News, as related
to him by Ernest Pollard.
"[The author Ma] assembled an appalling mass of very raw data on which
he has leaped, with the agility of
Raphael Pumpelly's
mouflon, from assumption to assumption to heights of speculation where few
would care to follow."
-J.W. Wells, Nature, 197, 948 (1963)
[a mouflon is a corsican wild mountain sheep; Raphael Pumpelly a
distinguished american geologist, author of Travels and Adventures
of Raphael Pumpelly, Mining Engineer, Geologist (1920); as a student
he had a pet mouflon ram which had many destructive adventures, e.g. in
a Vienna hotel where he attacked many other mouflon rams visible in
the staircase mirrors.]
"I don't mind you thinking slowly; I mind you publishing faster than
you think."
-Wolfgang Pauli
"God knows what happens to your time once you have begun to get old.
You are busy all the time, you do important things, you work, and yet
when you sum it all up the result is nothing."
-Jons Berzelius
"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
"Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature."
-Martin H. Fischer
"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" roughly, "The perfect is the
enemy of the good."
-Voltaire
"To kill an error is as good a service, and sometimes even better than,
establishing a new truth or fact."
-Charles Darwin
"Everything of importance has been said before, by someone who
did not discover it."
-Alfred North Whitehead (1916 address to BAAS)
"My seminar is for highschool students, decent undergraduates,
bright graduates, and outstanding professors."
-Israel Moiseevich Gelfand
Wisdom for Caltech undergrads:
"I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each
day two things they dislike: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that
I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone
to bed."
-W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (Chapt 2, par 2)
"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."
-William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice (i. iii. 93)
(referring to the Devil's quote of Psalm 91:12 when tempting Christ
in Matthew 4:6)
"The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment
an incredible miracle"
-Col. John P. Stapp (this is known as Stapp's Ironical Paradox)
Warning for cosmologists and supernova observers and theorists:
"Our platonic heritage prompts us to view means and medians as the
hard `realities,' and the variation that permits their calculation as
a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence.
But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's
only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard realtity, not a
set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians
are the abstractions."
- Stephen Jay Gould Full House
The end. Go home.