The Faber Book of Science Quotes

“For those who have trouble with a telephone number or with a name to fit a face, it is even problematical contemplating the gap between us and them, the normal and the genius. Someone once asked A. C. Aitken, professor at Edinburgh University, to make 4 divided by 47 into a decimal. After four seconds he started and gave another digit every three-quarters of a second: ‘point 08510638297872340425531914’. He stopped (after twenty-four seconds), discussed the problem for one minute, and then restarted: ‘191489’– five-second pause –‘361702127659574468 . Now that’s the repeating point. It starts again with 085. So if that’s forty-six places, I’m right.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War 1. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry, which requires more than 10 bits of information to understand.
Carl Sagan”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“Sometimes we hear pronouncements from scientists who confidently state that everything worth knowing will soon be known – or even is already known – and who paint pictures of a Dionysian or Polynesian age in which the zest for intellectual discovery has withered, to be replaced by a kind of subdued languor, the lotus eaters drinking fermented coconut milk or some other mild hallucinogen. In addition to maligning both the Polynesians, who were intrepid explorers (and whose brief respite in paradise is now sadly ending ), as well as the inducements to intellectual discovery provided by some hallucinogens, this contention turns out to be trivially mistaken.

__Carl Sagan”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.

George Orwell, cited by John Carey”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“Man’s view of the gorilla illustrates in a dramatic way the change from slaughter to conservation that distinguishes modern attitudes to wildlife. To nineteenth-century explorers and naturalists gorillas were evil.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“Without doubt the Pterodactyl attracted great attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the making of a bird in him. And so it turned out. Also the makings of a mammal, in time. One thing we have to say to his credit, that in the matter of picturesqueness he was the triumph of his Period; he wore wings and had teeth, and was a starchy and wonderful mixture altogether , a kind of long-distance premonitory symptom of Kipling’s marine:

’E isn’t one o’ the reg’lar Line, nor ’e isn’t one of the crew,
’E’s a kind of a giddy harumfrodite – soldier an’ sailor too!
Alfred Russel Wallace”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“The most remarkable of these (fossils) are teeth, wonderfully polished in the heart of their rough veinstone, bright with enamel as though still in a fresh state. Some of them are most formidable, triangular, finely jagged at the edges, almost as large as one’s hand. What an insatiable abyss, a jaw armed with such a set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of the gullet; what mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those serrate shears! You are seized with a shiver merely at the imaginary reconstruction of that awful implement of destruction!

The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the order of Squalidæ. Paleontology calls him Carcharodon Megalodon . The shark of to-day, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as the dwarf can give an idea of the giant.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“A nobler colour than all these – the noblest colour ever seen on this earth – one which belongs to a strength greater than that of the Egyptian granite, and to a beauty greater than that of the sunset or the rose – is still mysteriously connected with the presence of this dark iron. I believe it is not ascertained on what the crimson of blood actually depends; but the colour is connected, of course, with its vitality, and that vitality with the existence of iron as one of its substantial elements. Is it not strange to find this stern and strong metal mingled so delicately in our human life that we cannot even blush without its help?
John Ruskin "The Two Paths”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“By 1853 New York alone had 86 studios. The enormous demand for family pictures was due partly to the high nineteenth-century mortality rates, especially among children.

"Secure the shadow ere the substance fade,
Let Nature imitate what Nature made,"

ran the advertising slogan.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“For instance, Raphael, though descended from eight uninterrupted generations of painters, had to learn to paint apparently as if no Sanzio had ever handled a brush before. But he had also to learn to breathe, and digest, and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully grown adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even born fully grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm, and to struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he was indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull nor a backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for some time doubtful whether he was a bird or a fish. He had to compress untold centuries of development into nine months before he was human enough to break loose as an independent being.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“Thomas Malthus (1766– 1834), mathematician and clergyman, published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 , arousing a storm of abuse and controversy. By applying scientific thought to the question of population, which no one had done before, he contrived to show that it was impossible – despite the dreams of Utopian philosophers – for the whole of mankind to live in happiness and plenty.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science