The Art of Tetman Callis

“The retina is, in fact, the brain: in the development of the embryo, a piece of the brain comes out in front, and long fibers grow back, connecting the eyes to the brain. The retina is organized in just the way the brain is organized and, as someone has beautifully put it, ‘The brain has […]

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“I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” – Richard P. Feynman’s last words, as reported by Alan Lightman in “The One and Only”

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“No pencil has ever yet given anything like the true effect of an iceberg. In a picture, they are huge, uncouth masses, stuck in the sea, while their chief beauty and grandeur,—their slow, stately motion; the whirling of the snow about their summits, and the fearful groaning and cracking of their parts,—the picture cannot give. […]

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“At twelve o’clock we went below, and had just got through dinner, when the cook put his head down the scuttle and told us to come on deck and see the finest sight that we had ever seen. ‘Where away, cook?’ asked the first man who was up. ‘On the larboard bow.’ And there lay, […]

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“The difficulties of science are to a large extent the difficulties of notations, the units, and all the other artificialities which are invented by man, not by nature.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I

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“It will turn out . . . that many simple things can be deduced mathematically more rapidly than they can be really understood in a fundamental or simple sense. This is a strange characteristic, and . . . there are circumstances in which mathematics will produce results which no one has really been able to […]

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“Suppose that the true laws of motion of atoms were given by some strange equation which does not have the property that when we go to a larger scale we reproduce the same law, but instead has the property that if we go to a larger scale, we can approximate it by a certain expression […]

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“Space of itself, and time of itself will sink into mere shadows, and only a kind of union between them shall survive.” – Hermann Minkowski (quoted by Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I)

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“Do not laugh at notations; invent them, they are powerful. In fact, mathematics is, to a large extent, invention of better notations.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I

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“What we mean by ‘right now’ is a mysterious thing which we cannot define and we cannot affect, but it can affect us later, or we could have affected it if we had done something far enough in the past. When we look at the star Alpha Centauri, we see it as it was four […]

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“Poincaré made the following statement of the principle of relativity: ‘According to the principle of relativity, the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for a fixed observer as for an observer who has a uniform motion of translation relative to him, so that we have not, nor can we possibly have, any means […]

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“In learning any subject of a technical nature where mathematics plays a role, one is confronted with the task of understanding and storing away in the memory a huge body of facts and ideas, held together by certain relationships which can be ‘proved’ or ‘shown’ to exist between them. It is easy to confuse the […]

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“The glory of mathematics is that we do not have to say what we are talking about. The glory is that the laws, the arguments, and the logic are independent of what ‘it’ is. If we have any other set of objects that obey the same system of axioms as Euclid’s geometry, then if we […]

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“In order to understand physical laws you must understand that they are all some kind of approximation. Any simple idea is approximate; as an illustration, consider an object, … what is an object? Philosophers are always saying, ‘Well, just take a chair for example.’ The moment they say that, you know that they do not […]

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“We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about!’ The second one says, ‘What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What […]

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“Our most precise description of nature must be in terms of probabilities. There are some people who do not like this way of describing nature.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (emphases in original)

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“The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.” – James Clerk Maxwell (quoted by Richard P. Feynman in The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I )

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“What is time? It would be nice if we could find a good definition of time. Webster defines ‘a time’ as ‘a period,’ and the latter as ‘a time,’ which doesn’t seem to be very useful. Perhaps we should say: ‘Time is what happens when nothing else happens.’ Which also doesn’t get us very far. […]

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“An object has energy from its sheer existence.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (emphasis in original)

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“A poet once said, ‘The whole universe is in a glass of wine.’ We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.” – Richard P. […]

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“The things with which we concern ourselves in science appear in myriad forms, and with a multitude of attributes. For example, if we stand on the shore and look at the sea, we see the water, the waves breaking, the foam, the sloshing motion of the water, the sound, the air, the winds and the […]

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“In the absence of reliable extensional rheology data, we can only point to the fact that when cats are deformed along their principal axis, they tend to relax more easily, suggesting that the extensional time is smaller than the shear time. Transient strain‑hardening can nonetheless occur. Second, because, flows of cats are usually free surface […]

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“No living creature, not even man, has achieved, in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own; and were some one from another world to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation of the logic of life, we should needs have to offer the humble comb of […]

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“Nature is always magnificent when dealing with the privileges and prerogatives of love. She becomes miserly only when doling out the organs and instruments of labour. She is especially severe on what men have termed virtue, whereas she strews the path of the most uninteresting lovers with innumerable jewels and favours. ‘Unite and multiply; there […]

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“The most trivial secret of the non-human object we behold in nature connects more closely perhaps with the profound enigma of our origin and our end, than the secret of those of our passions that we study the most eagerly and the most passionately.” – Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee

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“Truly my own body being sickly, brought me easily into a capacity, to know that health was the greatest of all earthly blessings, and truly he was never sick that doth not believe it.” – Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

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“Verbal nonsense (Ganser syndrome) and physical nonsense (buffoonery syndrome) within the realm of medical science are pathologized conditions. Verbal nonsense (as in vaudeville, joking) and physical nonsense (as in slapstick, clowning) within the realm of entertainment (both on and off the stage) are conditions of art.” – Mady Schutzman, “Being Approximate: The Ganser Syndrome and […]

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“Agent livelock differs from agent deadlock in that the livelocked agent is not blocked or waiting for anything, but is continuously given tasks to perform and can never catch up or achieve its goal.” – Wayne Jansen and Tom Karygiannis, Mobile Agent Security

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“Normal humans in all societies manifest a sense of sympathy: an ability to treat the interests of others as comparable to their own. Unfortunately, the size of the moral circle in which sympathy is extended is a free parameter. By default, people sympathize only with members of their own family, clan, or village, and treat […]

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“Developmental psychology has shown that infants have a precocious grasp of objects, intentions, numbers, faces, tools, and language. Behavioral genetics has shown that temperament emerges early in life and remains fairly constant throughout the life span, that much of the variation among people within a culture comes from differences in genes, and that in some […]

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