As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. - Albert Einstein
| Mary, Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow? Photosynthesis, of course! From a T-shirt in the shop at London's Natural History Museum. |
As the radius of knowledge increases so too does the circumference of ignorance. - Anon.
"Then the Persians beseiged Barce for nine months, digging mines leading to the walls, and making violent assaults. As for the mines, a smith discovered them by the means of a brazen shield, and this is how he found them: carrying the shield round the inner side of the walls he smote it against the ground of the city; all other places where he smote it returned but a dull sound, but where the mines were the bronze of the shield rang clear. Here the Barcaeans made a counter-mine and slew those Persians who were digging the earth. Thus the mines were discovered and the assaults were beaten off by the townsmen."
- Herodotus describing an event c.580BC (quoted in Chris Liner's Greek Seismology).
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Why did the tachyon cross the road?
Got Mole problems? Call Avogadro 6.02 x 10^23
"[Pythagoras] worshipped whole numbers and simple fractions, the ratios of whole numbers. And he took his religion seriously. When one of his followers challenged his world view by discovering that a common measure, namely the length of the diagonal of a unit square (the square root of 2) could be expressed neither as a whole number nor as a simple fraction, Pythagoras became distraught and swore his disciples to secrecy. Legend has it that when one of his followers subsequently betrayed him, Pythagoras had him executed."
- From Paul Hoffman's biography of mathematician Paul Erdos, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.
It is a short step from a careless phrase to a flash of insight. - A.N. Whitehead
| A dozen, a gross and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four, Divided by seven, Plus five times eleven, Equals nine squared plus zero, no more. |
| Wanted, dead or alive : Schroedinger's cat. | Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives. |
| "Atmospheric railways operated upon the principle of a vacuum.
The most promising version had a
tube between the rails, inside which ran a piston connected to the train. (The connection to the
train passed through a slit along the top of the tube which was sealed by flaps of leather.) There
was a pumping station every three miles and, when the train reached one, a telegraph would be sent
to the next one to evacuate the section of tube between them which would then pull the train
along. Passengers loved the system as it was quiet and clean. Acceleration was impressive; on a
test run, one poor man inadvertently boarded a carriage which had not been coupled to any others
and was hauled along a mile of sharply curved track at an average speend of 84mph, by far the
fastest man on earth in the 1840s! The trains often got ahead of schedule and the Exeter-Newton
Abbot run was once done in 20 minutes, faster than today's Intercities!"
- From Eurekaaargh! by Adam Hart-Davis. | |
| Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. - Richard Feynman | |
| There are pi seconds in a nanocentury, to a couple of significant figures. | |
| The Bible shows us the way to go to Heaven but not the way the heavens go. - Galileo Galilei | |
| There was a young girl named Miss Bright
Who could travel much faster than light. She departed one day In an Einsteinian way And came back on the previous night. |
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof. - Ashley Montague
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd. - Anon.
"Several years ago I was terribly shocked to see a scene on video taken 2,000 metres deep under the sea. Drifting there were a great number of plastic sacks and supermarket shopping bags. It was a terrible scene of white plastic bags drifting under water upside down just like assembles [sic] of ghosts. These hundreds of thousands of plastic sacks under water may move, but will never disappear."
- Shoichi Oshima, Japanese hydrographer.
You can do mathematics anywhere. I once had a flash of insight into a stubborn problem in the middle of a back somersault with a triple twist on my trampoline. - Ronald Graham (mathematician)
A Short History of Medicine.
| I have an earache ... | |
| 2000 B.C. | Eat this root. |
| 1000 A.D. | That root is heathen; say this prayer. |
| 1850 A.D. | That prayer is superstition; drink this potion. |
| 1940 A.D. | That potion is snake oil; swallow this pill. |
| 1985 A.D. | That pill is ineffective; take this antibiotic. |
| 2000 A.D. | That antibiotic is artificial; eat this root. |
Science is built of facts as a house is built of stones but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. - Henri Poincare
| There is an infinite number of regular convex polygons (most of which are effectively circles) but only five regular convex polyhedra. What are they? ("Regular" polyhedra, otherwise known as Platonic solids, are those whose faces are all the same shape.) The answer is on Tom Gettys' Polyhedra Hyperpages. | |
| Entropy isn't what it used to be. | Absolute zero rules 0K. |
"The ancients attributed earthquakes to supernatural causes." - K.E. Bullen in An Introduction to the Theory of Seismology, 1963.
"Keep in mind that gods cause none of these things and that neither heaven nor earth is overturned by the wrath of deities. These phenomena have causes of their own." - Seneca in Natural Questions, c.62AD.
(Both quoted in Chris Liner's Greek Seismology).
A black hole is a tunnel at the end of the light.
The Otto Cycle: suck, squeeze, bang, fart. (Apparently once described thus on the Round Britain Quiz.)
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. - T.H. Huxley
A topologist is someone who doesn't know the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut.
Neither need we fear to diminish a miracle by explaining it. - Christopher Wren
| There was a young man who said "God,
I find it exceedingly odd, That the willow oak tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad." "Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd,
|
A man may imagine things that are false but he can only understand things that are true. - Isaac Newton.
pi is known to 50 billion decimal places but you only need to know it to 39 decimal places in order to compute the circumference of a circle girdling the known universe with an error of no more than the radius of an hydrogen atom. | |
| For a good prime call: 0555 793 7319 | i am the square root of minus one! |
The three laws of thermodynamics:
It is through science that we prove but through intuition that we discover. - Henri Poincare
What is (x-a)(x-b)(x-c)...(x-z)? Hint.
The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. - Niels Bohr