The Life of a Leaf Quotes

“Electrons and photons are still worse. In graduate school I roomed for a time with a particle physicist. He ended one attempt to explain the essence of an exciting lecture by admitting, with uncommon candor, that he could think of no explanation, not even an analogy, that wasn’t unacceptably misleading.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“This book intends to make the case for explanation by reduction to physics and mechanical engineering, to this alternative realm of explanation: not to alternative explanations but to explanations of phenomena with which the biologist’s classical chemical reductionism just doesn’t help. As we’ll see, this realm not only explains different phenomena but provides information that makes wonderfully satisfying intuitive sense.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“I knew about viscosity, but I’d heard about it in a course in physical chemistry, not in physics. Step by step, the questions I asked led me into the world of mechanical engineering. A reductionist path, yes, but a different one.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“Reductionism describes the scheme, and it has a long history of successes.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“The search for predictive and explanatory general rules—that’s the crux of our game.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“science isn’t about the things but about the relationships among the things.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“Recognize, though, that graphs and equations provide an economical and effective way of expressing things that torture the tongue.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“as I intend, you should begin to look with different eyes at your immediate surroundings, seeing not just leaves but yourself and everything around you as reflections of the physical situation here on solar planet number four. Too often we imagine science as a body of facts, growing breakthrough by breakthrough the way a pile of pancakes rises as each new one comes off the pan. At its core, though, science is not the facts but a way of thinking; not a body of knowledge but a way of knowing; a particular and peculiar way of looking at the world.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“I’m not even much of a gardener—my contribution to the family garden consists mainly of compost.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“The no-slip condition makes trouble—if subtle trouble—in our everyday lives. One swipe of a dishcloth works as well as lot of flowing hot water. The dishcloth contacts the dish, sweeping away surface mess; the flowing water doesn’t make such effective contact. Hot water works better than cold, not just because more substances dissolve in hot water, but because hot water has a much lower viscosity; that means more fluid moves close to the dish. Dust accumulates on the surfaces of fan blades; the low flow right near a blade’s surface isn’t enough to dislodge it.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“When a fluid flows across a solid surface—any fluid, any speed, any surface—the speed of flow at the surface is zero. This is the so-called no-slip condition. Its existence (or nonexistence) occasioned hot debate back in the mid-nineteenth century, but it fits so perfectly with both theory and measurement that it has long outlived any controversy. So where does the real flow begin? Just beyond some molecularly thick layer on the surface, which is to say beyond a negligibly thin layer. But this real flow begins as very slow flow near the surface, gradually speeding up at greater distances until it eventually reaches (put strictly, it approaches) the full speed of stream, bloodstream, or wind—as in figure 4.3”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf