Saturday, November 7, 2009

Physics Quote of the Day (November 1 - November 7)

"Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research." Marie Curie, born 7 November 1867.

"A patent is a legal analog of sticky fly paper: it attracts some of the lowest forms of life." David L. Webster, born 6 November 1888.

"In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the world "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as dx/dt = K(d²x/dy²) much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned. It is, however, a statement about something very unfamiliar to the plainman, namely, the rate of change of a rate of change." John Burdon Haldane, born 5 November 1892.

"If you really look at it, I was trying to sell a dream ... There was very little I could put in concrete to tell these people it was really real." Charles K. Kao, born 4 November 1933.

"It is electromagnetism (EM) in all its many forms that has been so basic, that haunts us and guides us." Nick Holonyak, born 3 November 1928.

"The beauty of physics lies in the extent to which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity." Melvin Schwartz, born 2 November 1932.

"... real understanding of a thing comes from taking it apart oneself, not reading about it in a book or hearing about it in a classroom. To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed." Robert B. Laughlin, born 1 November 1950.

No comments:

Post a Comment