Philip > Philip's Quotes

“As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: "Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

“In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace

“You cannot say, "I will look it up." Your birthday and social security number are things you look up; trigonometric functions and identities are what you know all the time.”
― R. Shankar, Fundamentals of Physics: Mechanics, Relativity, and Thermodynamics

“I find imaginary numbers useful when computing my tax deductions.”
― R. Shankar

“Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.”
― Nick Lane

“Storing genes, vulnerable informational systems, in the immediate vicinity of the mitochondrial respiratory chains, which leak destructive free radicals, is equivalent to storing a valuable library in the wooden shack of a registered pyromaniac.”
― Nick Lane

“We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex.....we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their support cells (the retinal pigment epithelium) with an excellent blood supply immediately underneath. Such an arrangement supports the continuous turnover of photosensitive pigments. The human retina consumes even more oxygen than the brain, per gram, making it the most energetic organ in the body.”
― nick lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

“One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“If all these considerations are correct, then the appearance of eyes really could have ignited the Cambrian explosion. And if that’s the case, then the evolution of the eye must certainly number among the most dramatic and important events in the whole history of life on earth.”
― Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

“Assume that your reader is tired, bored, and pressed for time.”
― Lyn Dupre

“This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends
to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and
secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies a particularly anomalous and
exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened
by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what
it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation
of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the
good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity
is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher,
is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated,
parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to
absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that
society and enhance the individual's prospects of success.

Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and
disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual
genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt
feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held
up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls
upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting
and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which
the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators
falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance
in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed
in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian
of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all
persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible
for the educator to please the entire society even if he
remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic
and rapidly changing era like the present.

Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than that
to parents alone. More than any other class· in society, teachers
mold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit to
them the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parents
may have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often the
first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles
and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all
the difference in the world to that child's future- and to the
world. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the conviction
that their child is unusual and should be encouraged in his
studies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even be
able to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken home
and a bad neighborhood.

It is just here, however--in our search for what we might call
the able, all-purpose, success-modeled student--that I feel it so
necessary not to lose sight of those darker, more uncertain, late-maturing,
sometimes painfully abstracted youths who may represent the Darwins, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes of the next
generation.”
― Loren Eiseley

“The teacher must ever walk warily between the necessity of inducing those conformities which in every generation reaffirm our rebellious humanity, and of allowing for the free play of the creative spirit.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“There are subjects for which I have more than ordinary affection because they are associated in my mind with kindly and understanding men or
women--sculptors who left even upon such impliant clay as mine the delicate chiseling of refined genius, who gave unwittingly something of their final character to most unpromising material.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular
story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us.... In short, like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us. If he is fortunate enough finally to be accepted, it is likely to be after a trial of ridicule and after the sting has been removed from his work by long familiarization and bowdlerizing, when the alien quality of his thought has been mitigated or removed.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“Science can be--and is--used by good men, but in its present sense it can scarcely be said to create them. Science, of course, in discovery represents the individual, but in the moment of triumph, science creates uniformity through which the mind of the individual once more flees away.... Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of mind alone.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“Bit by bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand And Stars: An Amazing Autobiography About the Wonder of Flying

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with
the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive
company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and
surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m.
of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who
betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all
too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We
forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered
and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have
already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things — the job, the house, the this, the that — do not really fill the place inside.”
― Robertson Davies, Conversations with Robertson Davies

“The shrimp's protein and ours are not exactly the same, but they're so
similar that if you turned up in court and tried to convince a judge that your
version was not a badly concealed plagiarism, you'd be very unlikely to win.
In fact, you'd be a laughing stock, for rhodopsin is not restricted to vent shrimp
and humans but is omnipresent throughout the animal kingdom.... Trying to persuade a judge that your rhodopsin is not plagiarised
would be like trying to clajm that your television set is fundamentally different
from everyone else's, just because it's bigger or has a flat screen.”
― nick lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

“If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“To many a practicing geologist or epidemiologist, the claim that the very simple computational models developed in the following chapters have anything to do with real earthquakes or real epidemics may well be deemed professionally offensive, or at best dismissed as an infantile nerdy joke.”
― Paul Charbonneau, Natural Complexity: A Modeling Handbook

“All the beauty in the world was made within the oppressive limitations of time and death and impermanence.”
― Joseph Fink, The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe

“Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
― James Clerk Maxwell

“statistical laws are not necessarily used as a result of our ignorance. statistical laws can reflect how things really are. there are matters that can only be treated statistically.”
― James Clerk Maxwell

“The only people who treasure systems are those whom the whole truth evades, who want to catch it by the tail. A system is just like the truth's tail, but the truth is like a lizard. It will leave the tail in your hand and escape; it knows that it will soon grow another tail.”
― Ivan Turgenev