Prose: Words in their best order;
Poetry: Best words in their best order.
Matthew Arnold 1822-1888
The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom William Blake 1757-1827
Home thoughts from abroad
Oh to be in England
Now that April's there;
For whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!
Robert Browning 1812-1889
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822
The properly normalized sum of independent random variables tends toward a normal distribution even if the original variables themselves are not normally distributed, implying that statistical methods that work for normal distributions can be applicable to other types of distribution.
The central limit theorem
Ubi materis, ibi geometria. Where there is matter, there is geometry. Johannes Kepler 1571-1630
Humanity will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot 1713-1784
All that glitters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons. J.D.Bernal 1901-1971
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The deep unfathomed caves of ocean bear.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste her sweetness on the desert air.
Thomas Gray 1716-1771
There was a door to which I found no key,
There was a veil through which I could not see
Edward Fitzgerald 1809-1883
She picked up a book of poems and handed it to me,
Written by an Italian poet in the thirteenth Century,
And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal,
Pourin' off of every page like they was written in my soul
Bob Dylan 1941- Tangled Up in Blue
(1) You cannot win;
(2) You cannot break even;
(3) You cannot get out of the game.
What are these rules?
What I tell you three times is true.
Lewis Carrol 1832-1898
The Hunting of the Snark
6.02214076 × 10<23>
Amadeo Avogadro 1776-1856
For in and out, above, about, below,
'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.
​
'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Man and Woman plays:
Hither and Thither moves, and mates, and slays,
Then one by one back in the closet lays.
Edward Fitzgerald 1809-1883
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone,
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown, the dream is gone
Pink Floyd ~1964- Comfortably Numb
How did they know?
We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of Physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of Geometry. Ludwig Wittgenstein 1891-1951
Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus
'Tis writ, 'In the beginning was the Word.'
I pause to wonder what is here inferred.
The Word I cannot set supremely high:
I new translation I will try.
I read, if by the spirit I am taught,
This sense: 'In the beginning was the Thought.'
This opening I need to weigh again,
Or sense may suffer from a hasty pen.
Does Thought create, and work, and rule the hour?
'Twere best: 'In the beginning was the Power.'
Yet, while the pen is urged with willing fingers,
A sense of doubt and hesitancy lingers.
The spirit comes to guide me in my need,
I write, 'In the beginning was the Deed.'
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749-1832
Faust Part 1
Let no one ignorant of geometry enter my door. Plato 429-347 BC
Occam's razor: "It is vain to do with more what can be done with less".
William of Occam 1300-1349
On the expedition to Peru to confirm the flattening of the Earth at the poles:
"You have confirmed in these faraway places what Newton found out without leaving his room".
Voltaire 1694-1778
Science is built up from facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. Henri Poincaré 1854-1912
Behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed behind him.
The Book of Revelation, The Bible, King James Version 1611
Perhaps about a crystal of alpha-quartz:
"Like the ski resort full of girls hunting for husbands and husbands hunting for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem". Alan Mackay 1926-
On being invited a second time to an orgy:
"No my friend; once a philosopher, twice a pervert".
Voltaire 1694-1778
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
​
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
the happy highways where I went
and cannot come again.
A.E. Housman 1859-1936
Whenever you can, count.
Francis Galton 1822-1911
Electricity is the soul of the Universe.
John Wesley 1703-1791
The empiricist thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing that at seeing.
George Santayana 1863-1952
Why they are as they are, and not otherwise.
Johannes Kepler 1571-1630; on the heavenly bodies in the preface to Mysterium Cosmographicum)
If you want to understand function, study structure.
Francis Crick 1916-2004
While to my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn--
All the live murmur of a summer's day.
Matthew Arnold 1822-1888; The Scholar Gypsy
That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.
Marcus Aurelius 121-180; Meditations. Does the inverse sound familiar?
A Grant Selection Committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Anonymous.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
Allen Ginsberg 1926-1997; Howl
Network: Anything reticulated or decussated, at equal intervals, with interstices between the intersections.
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784 in A Dictionary of the English Language. This now corresponds to a Unit-Distance Graph.
As many as 11% of the engineered female fruit flies, including some of their offspring, became capable of reproducing without a male.
Nature July 2023 Does this mean that men will eventually become superfluous?
Some drill and bore the solid Earth
and from the strata there
learn He who made it and revealed its date
to Moses was mistaken in its age.
William Cowper 1731-1800
...mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.
St. Augustine of Hippo 354-431
Errors using inadequate data are much less than errors using no data at all.
Charles Babbage 1792-1871
An atom must be at least as complex as a grand piano.
William Clifford 1845-1879
Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce (his) vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?
Judge Clayton W. Horne, rejecting the charge that "Howl" is obscene.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Albert Einstein 1879-1955
Reith explained his theory.... "Mind you, I may be wrong".
"No" said Cauch. "You have used an extraordinary mental process to adduce what I now see to be limpid truth".
"The process is called logic" said Reith.
Jack Vance 1916-2013; Tschai
Mathematics puts your brain in order.
Mikhail Lomonosov 1711-1765
“The evidence from science is getting stronger: distributing power between genders creates the kind of world we all need and want to be living in.” Nature editorial September 2023
Would this mean that my female family-members will stop telling me what to do all the time?
Simon Singh 1964-present;
Fermat's Last Theorem
To martyr yourself to caution
Is not goin’ to help at all,
‘Cause there’ll be no safety in numbers
When the right one walks out of the door.
​Pink Floyd, Lost for Words (Division Bell) 1994
“Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit".
Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471)
Science, November 2024;
FCH endorses this sentiment
TO BE CONTINUED