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No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
Happy Monday!
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
“Sir, there is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.”
James Randi
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”
(via likeaphysicist)
Observations always involve theory.
(via scienceisbeauty)
(Source: her0inchic)
One oft-told story about Bethe recounts the evening after he discovered the secrets of starlight. During a late-night stroll, his fiancee, Rose — daughter of theoretical physicist Paul Ewald — remarked on how beautiful the stars looked. He responded: “Yes, darling, and I’m the only one on Earth who knows how they do it.”
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl Popper
Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972)
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.
(via scienceisbeauty)
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
Landau kept a list of names of physicists which he ranked on a logarithmic scale of productivity ranging from 0 to 5. The highest ranking, 0.5, was assigned to Albert Einstein. A rank of 1 was awarded to “historical giants” Isaac Newton, Satyendra Nath Bose, Eugene Wigner, and the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger. Landau ranked himself as a 2.5 but later promoted himself to a 2. David Mermin, writing about Landau, referred to the scale, and ranked himself in the fourth division, in the article My Life with Landau: Homage of a 4.5 to a 2.
(Photo: Niels Bohr and Lev Landau from AIP)
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
(via scienceisbeauty)
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.
(via scienceisbeauty)
« If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. »
(Bertrand Russell )
