The Canon Quotes

“We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album?”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“You have your opinion, I have mine, and it takes all kinds of nuts and dips to make a party, right?”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“Your opinion doesn’t count. Your fond hopes and fantasies of Paradigms Found don’t count. What counts is the quality and the quantity of the evidence.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“The physicist Eugene Wigner talked of ”the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics“—in delineating the present, disinterring the past, and baking a trustier fortune cookie.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“As the Princeton astrophysicist John Bahcall put it in an interview shortly before he died, we crawled out of the ocean, we are confined to a tiny landmass circling a midsize, middle-aged, pale-faced sun located in one arm of just another pinwheel galaxy among millions of star-spangled galaxies; yet we have come to comprehend the universe on the largest scales and longest time frames, from the subatomic out to the edge of the cosmos. “It’s remarkable, it’s extraordinary, and it didn’t have to be that way,” Bahcall said.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“You understand that photons representing all colors of the rainbow stream from the sun and strike the surface of the rose, but that, as a result of the molecular composition of pigments in the rose, it’s the red photons that bounce off its petals and up to your eyes, and so you see red.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“Another fail-safe way to change the way you see the world is to invest in a microscope.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album? “Most of the time, when people walk outside at night and see the stars, it’s a big, pretty background, and it’s not quite real,” said the Caltech planetary scientist Michael Brown. “It doesn’t occur to them that the pattern they see in the sky repeats itself once a year, or to appreciate why that’s true.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“We are of the universe, and by studying the universe we ultimately turn the mirror on ourselves.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“not a body of facts, it is a way of thinking.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“physicist Werner Heisenberg, whose famed uncertainty principle says that you can know the position of an electron as it orbits the nuclear heart of an atom, or you can know its velocity, but that you can’t know both at once.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” the novelist and essayist Thomas Mann complained. “When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral,” said Carl Hiaasen—and he writes comic novels.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“You don’t need to visit a foreign country or hike a desert canyon or go out on a cloudless, moonless night and get drunk on star champagne.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“As youth flowers into maturity, the barrier between nerd and herd grows taller and thicker and begins to sprout thorns.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“Or try the star-spangled bowl of a desert sky at night and consider that, as teeming as the proscenium above may seem to your naked gape, you are seeing only about 2,500 of the 300 billion stars in our Milky Way—and that there are maybe 100 billion other star-studded galaxies in our universe besides, beyond your unaided view.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“the great statistician Frederick Mosteller had a point when he said, “It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them.” Nevertheless, there are some steps you can take to, as Huff put it, “talk back to a statistic.” Among the biggies recommended by many scientists is to ask a simple question: Does the figure, finding, or correlation make sense, that is, accord with what you know of objective reality?”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“Scientists get annoyed at the hackneyed notion that their pursuit of knowledge diminishes the mystery or art or “holiness” of life.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“After I die,” my daughter said, “I hope some of my atoms can find their way into a cat.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“he said. "Academy alumni with quantitative skills go on to become stockbrokers. There are damned few patrician scientists.”
― Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science