“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” – Isaac Asimov (quoted by Wendy Northcutt in The Darwin Awards: Next Evolution)
Category: Science
“What is your substance, whereof are you made, that millions of strange shadows on you tend?” – William Shakespeare, “Sonnet LIII”
“I don’t fear things that will only kill me. I don’t even fear things that will kill me and take out a city block. I fear most the things that will leave me alive in good health, and living with the terror of my continued existence.” – Matt Harbowy, “What Chemical Do Scientists Fear the Most?”
“In a starfish, none of the separate arms knows what the others are up to or what is happening to them. There is no integration at a neural level. Or consider an image on your computer screen; each pixel is quite independent from the pixels around it; you can change one without altering the others. Human beings are very different. Change one neuron and changes will occur in hundreds if not thousands of others. Read about Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, or Proust’s Marcel in La Recherche and you’ll see that everything that happens to them is immediately mixed up with everything else. Everything connects. A human being is the ultimate causal Gordian knot. You can’t disentangle it.” – Riccardo Manzotti, “Does Information Smell?”
“We do not verify the hypotheses of science; instead, if we have any intellectual honour, we do our level best to disconfirm even our own theories. The process is Darwinian: the properly successful scientific theories are the ones that have survived, by a kind of logical natural selection.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“To speak of yesterday, today, and tomorrow is simply to give different names to the same illusion.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“The time for miracles has either passed or has not yet come, and besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means distorting logic and the very nature of things in order to prove them.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Early and medieval Christians assumed female hysterics were possessed by the devil and utilized a combination of prayer, exorcism, and torture to cure them. Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, scholars and physicians more benignly concluded that hysteria was a mental disease, properly ameliorated by regular marital sex, frequent pregnancy, childbirth, daily orgasms, and the occasional rest cure. By the early twentieth century, female hysteria encompassed a burgeoning range of symptoms, including compulsive speech or muteness, inappropriate movement or paralysis, deafness, hallucinations, anxiety, insomnia, fainting, amnesia. Severely affected patients were hospitalized or institutionalized, treated with hypnosis, physical restraints, and pelvic massage to induce climax.” – Anne Kenner, “Saying It”
“Rarely, accidental deaths occur when a car is started and left running in a garage to warm up while the driver goes back to the house. Carbon monoxide from the exhaust then leaks into the house, killing the residents. Occasionally, someone commits suicide in a garage by leaving the car running, and at the same time inadvertently kills the occupants of the house as well.” – Dominick J. Di Maio & Vincent J. M. Di Maio, Forensic Pathology
“Life can be recognized by its deeds — life is disequilibrium.” – E. G. Nisbet & N. H. Sleep, “The habitat and nature of early life”
“A very simple definition of a living system might be: compartments separated from their surroundings that spontaneously multiply with energy gleaned through self-contained, thermodynamically favourable redox reactions.” – William Martin and Michael J. Russell, “On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells”
“Psychoanalysis was and is a shamanism; its affiliations with occultism or parapsychology are far more authentic than its supposed links to biology, as a discipline. Freud kept hoping that psychoanalysis would make a contribution to biology, but this was an absurd wish. Though it is an ideology that exalts fact, Freud’s creation is a mythology, reared upon the central myths of the drives of love and death. In the longest perspective its deepest affinities are with the pre-Socratic shaman Empedocles, whose vision of incessant strife emerges again in the Freudian tragic view of a civil war in the individual psyche.” – Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium
“Mammals and dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor about 260 million years ago. Dinosaurs subsequently evolved to fill every possible ecological niche, from which they ruled the earth for 160 million years and became the most successful vertebrates in the history of the planet. During all that time we mammals managed to evolve into nothing larger than a cat.” – Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, “First Fine Careless Raptor”
“It seems clear that untreated trauma arising from abuse during childhood constitutes a major risk factor for a variety of mental health and social problems later in life. The implications of this relationship are substantial. They suggest that some significant proportion of the psychological and psychosocial difficulties of adolescents and adults are directly attributable to childhood maltreatment.” – John M. Briere, Child Abuse Trauma: Theory and Treatment of the Lasting Effects
“We were proved right. It didn’t seem to matter.” – Dr. Kate Marvel, “I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m not Screaming Into the Void Anymore”
“Extreme poverty and homelessness exemplify ways in which American society fails to provide minimal support for many of its citizens and, as a result, indirectly maltreats large numbers of children.” – John M. Briere, Child Abuse Trauma: Theory and Treatment of the Lasting Effects
“You would, at first sight, think that a low-energy electron would have great difficulty passing through a solid crystal. The atoms are packed together with their centers only a few angstroms apart, and the effective diameter of the atom for electron scattering is roughly an angstrom or so. That is, the atoms are large, relative to their spacing, so that you would expect the mean free path between collisions to be of the order of a few angstroms—which is practically nothing. You would expect the electron to bump into one atom or another almost immediately. Nevertheless, it is a ubiquitous phenomenon of nature that if the lattice is perfect, the electrons are able to travel through the crystal smoothly and easily—almost as if they were in a vacuum. This strange fact is what lets metals conduct electricity so easily; it has also permitted the development of many practical devices. It is, for instance, what makes it possible for a transistor to imitate the radio tube. In a radio tube electrons move freely through a vacuum, while in the transistor they move freely through a crystal lattice.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III
“If you were to throw 10 billion photons at a polarizing filter, and the average probability of each one going through is, say, 3/4, you would expect 3/4 of 10 billion would get through. Likewise, the energy that they would carry would be 3/4 of the energy that you attempted to put through. Classical theory says nothing about the statistics of the thing—it simply says that the energy that comes through will be precisely 3/4 of the energy which you were sending in. That is, of course, impossible if there is only one photon. There is no such thing as 3/4 of a photon. It is either all there, or it isn’t there at all. Quantum mechanics tells us it is all there 3/4 of the time.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III
“Quantum mechanics is a different kind of a theory to represent the world. . . . Nature knows the quantum mechanics, and the classical mechanics is only an approximation; so there is no mystery in the fact that in classical mechanics there is some shadow of quantum mechanical laws—which are truly the ones underneath. To reconstruct the original object from the shadow is not possible in any direct way, but the shadow does help you to remember what the object looks like. . . . We must always go back to the real world and discover the correct quantum mechanical equations. When they come out looking like something in classical physics, we are in luck.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III
“If you think technology is going to solve your problems, you don’t understand technology, and you don’t understand your problems.” – Laurie Anderson (interviewed by Anderson Cooper)
“We speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx—or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it—and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongues around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, and sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a string of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.” – Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
“The trouble with quantum mechanics is not only in solving the equations but in understanding what the solutions mean.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III
“If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a noise? A real tree falling in a real forest makes a sound, of course, even if nobody is there. Even if no one is present to hear it, there are other traces left. The sound will shake some leaves, and if we were careful enough we might find somewhere that some thorn had rubbed against a leaf and made a tiny scratch that could not be explained unless we assumed the leaf were vibrating. So in a certain sense we would have to admit that there is a sound made. We might ask: was there a sensation of sound? No, sensations have to do, presumably, with consciousness. And whether ants are conscious and whether there were ants in the forest, or whether the tree was conscious, we do not know.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III (emphases in original)
“It turns out—although it is not at all self-evident—that in all circumstances where it has been experimentally checked, the velocity of a fluid is exactly zero at the surface of a solid. You have noticed, no doubt, that the blade of a fan will collect a thin layer of dust—and that it is still there after the fan has been churning up the air. You can see the same effect even on the great fan of a wind tunnel. Why isn’t the dust blown off by the air? In spite of the fact that the fan blade is moving at high speed through the air, the speed of the air relative to the fan blade goes to zero right at the surface. So the very smallest dust particles are not disturbed.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II
“To imagine a man perfectly free and not subject to the law of inevitability, we must imagine him all alone, beyond space, beyond time, and free from dependence on cause.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)(emphases in original)
“Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements. There is a well known, so-called sophism of the ancients consisting in this, that Achilles could never catch up with a tortoise he was following, in spite of the fact that he traveled ten times as fast as the tortoise. By the time Achilles has covered the distance that separated him from the tortoise, the tortoise has covered one tenth of that distance ahead of him: when Achilles has covered that tenth, the tortoise has covered another one hundredth, and so on forever. This problem seemed to the ancients insoluble. The absurd answer (that Achilles could never overtake the tortoise) resulted from this: that motion was arbitrarily divided into discontinuous elements, whereas the motion both of Achilles and of the tortoise was continuous. By adopting smaller and smaller elements of motion we only approach a solution of the problem, but never reach it. Only when we have admitted the conception of the infinitely small, and the resulting geometrical progression with a common ratio of one tenth, and have found the sum of this progression to infinity, do we reach a solution of the problem. A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of motion which used to appear insoluble. This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing with problems of motion admits the conception of the infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid when it deals with separate elements of motion instead of examining continuous motion. In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous. To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all those human wills, man’s mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected units. The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another. The second method is to consider the actions of some one man—a king or a commander—as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a single historic personage. Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others, or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of many men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is in itself false. It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some larger or smaller unit as the subject of observation—as criticism has every right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must always be arbitrarily selected. Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)(emphases in original)
“In quantum mechanics the angular momentum of a thing does not have an arbitrary direction, but its component along a given axis can take on only certain equally spaced, discrete values. It is a shocking and peculiar thing. . . . There isn’t any descriptive way of making it intelligible that isn’t so subtle and advanced in its own form that it is more complicated than the thing you were trying to explain. The behavior of matter on a small scale is different from anything that you are used to and is very strange indeed. . . . It is a good idea to try to get a growing acquaintance with the behavior of things on a small scale, at first as a kind of experience without any deep understanding. Understanding of these matters comes very slowly, if at all. Of course, one does get better able to know what is going to happen in a quantum-mechanical situation—if that is what understanding means—but one never gets a comfortable feeling that these quantum-mechanical rules are ‘natural’ . . . . It would be dishonest to describe the magnetic properties of materials without mentioning the fact that the classical description of magnetism—of angular momentum and magnetic moments—is incorrect.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II
“If you watch videos of falling cats, you will see that a lot of them use their tails to turn over. But we also know that cats without tails can turn over just fine. So from a physics point of view, the problem has reached a level where the details depend on the specific cat. People will still argue about it. I think a lot of physicists don’t realize how complicated the problem is, and they’re often just looking for a single simple solution. Physicists have an instinct to look for simple solutions, but nature’s always looking for the most effective solution. And those two approaches are not always the same.” – Greg Gbur, “The Surprisingly Complicated Physics of Why Cats Always Land on Their Feet” (interview by Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica, December 25, 2019)
“Balancing involves making a correction for what is going wrong. And this is not possible, in general, if there are several things going wrong at once.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II
“The total charge in the world is always constant—there is never any net gain or loss of charge.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II