"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." Albert Einstein ================================================================ "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" Steven Weinberg ================================================================ "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose." J. B. S. Haldane ================================================================ "If you would not be forgotten As soon as you are dead and rotten Either write things worth reading, Or do things worth the writing." Benjamin Franklin ================================================================ "Scientific research consists in seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what no one else has thought" Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Nobel Prize 1937 ================================================================ "I am an old man, and when I die and go to heaven, there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. About the former, I am really rather optimistic." Sir Horace Lamb, 1931 ================================================================ "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Bernard Shaw ================================================================ "The physicist rightly dreads precise argument, since an argument which is only convincing if precise loses all its force if the assumptions upon which it is based are slightly changed, while an argument which is convincing though imprecise may well be stable under small perturbations of its underlying axioms." From "The Pernicious Influence of Mathematics on Science" by Mark Kac ====================================================================== Exact quote, no, but I do recall that there were two parts to it: He was asked first by Queen Victoria of what use electricity was, and replied that the question might similarly be asked of an infant; someday, it would become an adult and then the answer would be known. Subsequently, Gladstone, the Chairman of the Exchequer, asked this, and Faraday replied that presently it would be taxed. ====================================================================== "As soon as we have some large computers working, the problems of meteorology will be solved. All processes that are stable we shall predict, and all processes that are unstable we shall control." John von Neumann, 1950. ================================================================ "A theoretical physicist is a physicist without the ability to perform real experiments. A mathematical physicist is a mathematician without the ability to perform real mathematics." David Mermin ================================================================ "There is lots of music still to be written in C major." Arnold Schoenberg ================================================================ "The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable while literature is unread." Oscar Wilde ================================================================ "The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer". ================================================================ "In this section, a mathematical model of the growing embryo will be described. This model will be a simplification and an idealization, and consequently a falsification. It is to be hoped that the features retained for discussion are those of greatest importance in the present state of knowledge." A. M. Turing, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis", Aug, 1952. ================================================================ "If an experiment does not hold out the possibility of causing one to revise one's views, it is hard to see why it should be done at all." Peter B. Medawar ================================================================ Why computer manuals drive people crazy: "Type the field name Name in the Field Name field." ================================================================ Quidquid latine dictum sit, alutum viditur. "Anything said in Latin sounds profound." ================================================================ "Physics is a branch of knowledge that is just about complete. The important discoveries, all of them, have been made. It is hardly worth entering physics anymore." Max Planck's physics teacher ================================================================ "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field." Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962) ================================================================ The motto of Jacque Cousteau's ship the Calypso: "Il faut aller voir" ("We must go and see for ourselves"). Cousteau died Wednesday, June 25, 1997. ================================================================ "Don't take yourself too seriously, but you had better take the physics very seriously." Robert Dicke ================================================================ "The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than in theory." ================================================================ "More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency, without necessarily achieving it, than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity." W.A. Wulf ================================================================ "The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and in science.... He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. The sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as feeble reflexion, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is." - Albert Einstein ================================================================ From "The Camel's Nose" by Knut Schimdt-Nielsen "Many years ago I heard the tale of Hevesy's [George de Hevesy, Hungarian chemist] first radioactive tracer experiment, one that never made it into the scientific literature. While in Manchester, he lived in a boardinghouse where the meals were less than appealing. There, as in boardinghouses everywhere, the tenants surmised that hash was made from leftovers and plate scrapings from the previous day. "To confirm his suspicions, one night Hevesy surreptitiously added a small amount of polonium to the food he left on his plate. The next day, he brought to dinner an electroscope, consisting of a glass case in which a light strip of thin gold foil stands out horizontally when the instrument carries an electric charge, but hangs down limply when the charge is lost. Hevesy rubbed his pocket comb against his woolen vest and transferred the static charge to the electroscope. The gold leaf stood straight out until the expected platter of hash appeared on the table; at the moment the gold leaf dropped to the discharged position, indicating the presence of ionizing radiation. Hevesy is said to have moved to a different boardinghouse. If the story is true, this may well have been the world's first radioactive tracer experiment." ================================================================ "Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Wernher von Braun ================================================================ "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Stephen Weinberg ================================================================ In Oliver Sacks New Yorker article "Brilliant Lights" (12/20/99, pages 56-73), he quotes Niels Bohr as saying: "Prior to this [invention of quantum theory], spectra seemed as beautiful and meaningless as butterfly wings" Rather amusing since butterfly wings are now rather well understood in terms of pattern formation. ================================================================ During 1969 hearings, Senator Pastore asked Robert Wilson to explain how the research would be important to national defense. "It has nothing to do with defending our country," Wilson replied, "except to make it worth defending." ================================================================ "Science is the art of systematic simplification." Karl Popper ================================================================ "A theory that explains everything, explains nothing." Karl Popper ================================================================ "My problem is that I know too much to tackle that. I'm a strong believer that ignorance is important in science. If you know too much, you start seeing why things won't work. That's why it's important to change your field to collect more ignorance." Sydney Brenner, biologist. ================================================================ "I intend to stop speaking before you stop listening." George J. Mitchell, the former senator from Maine, told his audience at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. ================================================================ "If we can shrink the world's population to a village of only 100 people, keeping all existing ratios the same, that village would look like this: there would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere -- north and south -- and 21 Africans; 52 would be female; 70 would be nonwhite and 30 white; 70 would be non-Christian and 30 would be Christian. Six of the 100 people would own 59 percent of all the wealth in the world, and all 6 of those people would be from the United States. Eighty of the 100 people would live in substandard housing. Seventy would be unable to read and write. Fifty would suffer from malnutrition. One would have a college education." Julian Bond, Chairman, N.A.A.C.P. Washington University, St. Louis. ================================================================ "The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contains such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality==or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way." Richard Feynman in Volume II, Section 41, page 12 of "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", 1964. ================================================================ Pepper intensity is measured in Scoville units, a system devised in 1912 by Wilbur Scoville, a Detroit pharmacologist. Jalapeno peppers rate 2,500 to 5,000 units. The habanero extract used by Dr. Osborn registers 1,000,000 Scoville units. From a NY Times article on using pepper to prevent elephants from raiding a farm. ================================================================ "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." Poet Muriel Rukeyser. ================================================================ In regard to a wrong answer to a math question, teacher says to the student "Save that answer==I might ask that question someday." ================================================================ "Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors". T. H. Huxley: ================================================================ "Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth." Galilei, Galileo (1564 - 1642) Opere Il Saggiatore p. 171, 1623. ================================================================ "Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so." Galilei, Galileo (1564 - 1642) Quoted in H. Weyl "Mathematics and the Laws of Nature" in I Gordon and S. Sorkin (eds.) The Armchair Science Reader, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. ================================================================ "I assign more value to discovering a fact, even about the minute thing, than to lengthy disputations on the Grand Questions that fail to lead to true understanding whatever" Galileo Galilei ================================================================ "One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment." Steven Weinberg, U. of Texas, Dallas Morning News, Oct 23, 2001. ================================================================ "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 ================================================================ "It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." Paul Dirac ================================================================ "The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble." Paul Dirac upon completing the theory of QED. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Vol. 123, No. 792 (6 April 1929). ================================================================ "It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. For this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom." Einstein, in regard to modern methods of education. ================================================================ What do you get when you cross an elephant with a zebra? Elephant zebra sin theta. ================================================================ Motto of the Paleontological Societyr: "Frango ut patefaciam." "I break in order to reveal." Good choice for particle physics also. ================================================================ "Biting into an apple and finding a maggot is unpleasant enough, but finding half a maggot is worse. Discovering one-third of a maggot would be more distressing still: The less you find, the more you may have eaten. Extrapolating to the limit, an encounter with no maggot at all should be the ultimate bad-apple experience. This remorseless logic fails however, because the limit is singular: A very small maggot fraction (f << 1) is qualitatively different from no maggot (f=0). Limits in physics can be singular too -- indeed they usually are -- reflecting deep aspects of our scientific description of the world." Article "Singular Limits" by Michael Berry, Physics Today May 2002, pages 10-11 ================================================================ "A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five." Groucho Marx ================================================================ "There's a reason physicists are so successful with what they do, and that is they study the hydrogen atom and the helium ion and then they stop." Richard Feynman ================================================================ Changeux's paradox: how do 30,000 human genes determine 10^11 neural cells with 10^15 connections? From J.-P. Changeux, "Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind" (trans. Garey, L.; Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). ================================================================ "Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt." Lev Landau ================================================================ Samuel Johnson once said, "There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it." ================================================================ I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove And in our bound partition never part. Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(thi)! Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" ================================================================ "The best evidence we have that there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe is that nobody has tried to contact us." Calvin and Hobbes ================================================================ "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously?" Noah Chomsky ================================================================ "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983) ================================================================ "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." Churchill ================================================================ "We are all agreed that your theory is absolutely crazy. But what divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough." Niels Bohr, when asked for his opinion of Wolfgang Pauli's unified theory. ================================================================ "I should think we might fairly gauge the future of biological science, centuries ahead, by estimating the time it will take to reach a complete, comprehensive understanding of odor. It may not seem a profound enough problem to dominate all the life sciences, but it contains, piece by piece, all the mysteries." From Lewis Thomas's essay "On Smell", in his book "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's 9th Symphony (New York, Viking, 1983) ================================================================ "When nothing else subsists from the past," he wrote, "after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory." Marcel Proust ================================================================ "While I was gone, someone stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with an exact replica. When I told my roommate, he said, "Do I know you?" Stephen Wright ================================================================ Vicomte de Valvert: Ah... your nose... hem! Your nose is rather large! Cyrano (gravely): Rather. Valvert (simpering): Oh well== Cyrano (coolly): Is that all? Valvert (turns away with a shrug): Well of course== Cyrano: Ah no, young sir! You are too simple. Why, you might have said -- Oh a great many things! Mon dieu, why waste your opportunity? For example, thus: AGGRESSIVE: I, sir, if that nose were mine, I'd have it amputated - on the spot! FRIENDLY: How do you drink with such a nose? You ought to have a cup made specially. DESCRIPTIVE: 'Tis a rock - a crag - a cape - A cape? say rather a peninsula! INQUISITIVE: What is that receptacle - A razor-case or a portfolio? KINDLY: Ah, do you love the little birds so much that they come and sing to you, you give them this to perch on? INSOLENT: Sir, when you smoke, the neighbours must suppose your chimney is on fire. ENTERPRISING: What a sign for some perfumer! SIMPLE: When do they unveil the monument? "Cyrano de Bergerac", play written by Edmond Rostand (1868-1918). ================================================================ "Long range detailed weather predictions is therefore impossible, and the only detailed prediction which is possible is the inference of the ultimate trend and character of a storm from observations of its early stages; and the accuracy of this prediction is subject to the condition that the flight of a grasshopper in Montana may turn a storm aside from Philadelphia to New York." W. S. Franklin of Lehigh in Phys. Rev 6:170-175 (1898): This is long before Lorenz and his butterfly! ================================================================ "Prediction is hard, especially about the future." Niels Bohr (attributed to other people also) ================================================================ "There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants that have to be determinted. The correspondence is very close, but the subject of cryptograpy is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily." Alan Turing ================================================================ "There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper." Francis Crick in his 1994 book "The Astonishing Hypothesis". ================================================================ "We are not who we are simply because we think. We are who we are because we can remember what we have thought about". Larry Squire and Eric Kandel ================================================================ At the present time it is of course quite customary for physicists to trespass on chemical ground, for mathematicians to do excellent work in physics, and for physicists to develop new mathematical procedures. Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science. Wolfgang Koehler (1887-1967) ================================================================ "Science is about why; engineering is about why not." Dean Kamen ================================================================ "Trying to understand vision by studying only neurons is like trying to understand bird flight by studying only feathers: it just cannot be done." David Marr in his book Vision (W. H. Freeman, 1982) ================================================================ Letter to Einstein from a student Carol of Zanesville, Ohio, November 12, 1952 Dear Dr. Einstein, I am a pupil in the sixth grade at Westview school. We have been talking about animals and plants in Science. There are a few children in our room who do not understand why people are classed as animals. I would appreciate it very much if you would please answer this and explain to me why people are classed as animals. Thanking you, Sincerely, Carol Einstein's reply to the children of Westview school Dear Children: We should not ask "What is an animal" but "what sort of thing do we call an animal?" Well, we call something an animal which has certain characteristics: it takes nourishment, it descends from parents similar to itself, it grows, it moves by itself, it dies if its time has run out. That's why we call the worms, the chicken, the dog, the monkey an animal. What about us humans? Think about it in the above mentioned way and then decide for yourselves whether it is a natural thing to regard ourselves as animals. With kind regards, Albert Einstein From the book "Dear Professor Einstein" edited by Alice Calaprice (Prometheus Books, 2002) ================================================================ Scintillate, scintillate Globule vivific Fain would I fathom Thy nature specific Loftily perched In the ether capacious Strongly resembling A gem carbonaceous. A polysyllabic version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" ================================================================ "To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you." Isaac Newton ================================================================ An interesting (and perhaps apocryphal too) story about the coining of "LASER" (for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation") is that the initial description of this physical concept was to be "Light Oscillation by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". Why the "oscillation" was replaced by "amplification" is amply clear from the two possible acronyms! J. Ramanand ================================================================ "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry." ==Bertrand Russell, Study of Mathematics ================================================================ "We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." Niels Bohr ================================================================ "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Yogi Berra ================================================================ "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." Quote from Enrico Fermi ================================================================ "I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!" Richard Feynman ================================================================ Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. B. F. Skinner, New Scientist, 1964 May 21 ================================================================ "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!), but 'That's funny ...' " Isaac Asimov ================================================================ "Is biology too difficult for biologists? And what can physics, dealing with the simple and lawful, contribute to biology, which deals with the complex and diverse?" Per Bak, Nature 391, 652 - 653 (12 February 1998) ================================================================ "It would be more descriptive, less boring, and historically more accurate, to replace the titles of Newton's first, second and third laws with the law of inertia (Descartes and Galileo, not Newton, first formulated it), Newton's law of motion, and the law of force pairs (or the law of interactions)." Art Hobson ================================================================ "I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am." Samuel Johnson ================================================================ "The surface is like a jigsaw puzzle for which the picture is not provided on the box cover. Dr. Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona, about the first pictures of Titan from the Cassini probe. November 1, 2004 ================================================================ "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." Niels Bohr ================================================================ "I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone." Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ programming language ================================================================ "To speak algebraically: Mr. Mathews is execrable but Mr. Channing is (x+1)ecrable." Edgar Allen Poe ================================================================ "To search thoroughly for the truth involves a searching of souls as well as of spectra." Lemaitre ================================================================ "There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe that there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Richard Feynman, BBC Publications, 1965, p. 129. ================================================================ "Ut queant laxis resonare fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes." Latin hymn to St. John, whose first syllables led to the solfege "Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do", and to the word "gamut". Translation: "Free from guilt your servants' unclean lips, holy John, that they may be able to sing with clear voices the wonders of your life." ================================================================ "There is no sadder sight in the world than to see a beautiful theory killed by a brutal fact." Thomas Huxley ================================================================ "The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Oh, joy, rapture! I've got a brain." The Scarecrow in the movie "The Wizard of Oz", mangling the Pythagorean theorem. (One can easily show that no triangle can satisfy the Scarecrow's expression.) ================================================================ Every biologist is, at heart, a chemist. And every chemist is, at heart, a physicist. And every physicist is, at heart, a mathematician. And every mathematician is, at heart a philosopher. And every philosopher is, at heart, a biologist." Anonymous ================================================================ "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." Albert Einstein ================================================================ "What is beauty? The modern definition is that beauty is a quantum number that accounts for the existence and lifetime of the upsilon particle." ================================================================ "The belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto." William James definition of religion. ================================================================ There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough." William James ================================================================ "There are at present fundamental problems in theoretical physics awaiting solution, e.g. the relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics and the nature of atomic nuclei (to be followed by more difficult ones such as the problem of life), the solution of which problems will presumably require a more drastic revision of our fundamental concepts than any that have gone before." Paul Dirac, 1931 ================================================================ "If the human brain was so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." Emerson Pugh, IBM computer scientist. ================================================================ "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." William Butler Yeats ================================================================ When the poet Paul Valery once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one." Mentioned in Bill Bryson's book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything". ================================================================ "When I write, I try to express difficult ideas in a simple way. In poetry, it is just the opposite." Paul Dirac ================================================================ "It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without statistics" Andrejs Dunkels ================================================================ "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Mark Twain ================================================================ "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do." Lucille Ball ================================================================ "Do only what only you can do." Advice to students from Edsger Wybe Dijkstra. ================================================================ "An extreme example of this inadvertent duplication of definite articles is in the name of the Los Angeles site of prehistoric fossils of animals that had been stuck in tar pits. It's called The La Brea Tar Pits which would literally translate as The The Tar Tar Pits." -Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org) ================================================================ A math poem by John Saxon: ( ( 12 + 144 + 20 + ( 3 * 4^(1/2) ) ) / 7) + (5 * 11) = 9^2 + 0 or in English: 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 and not a bit more. and an anonymous math poem: \int_(1)^(sqrt(3)) z^2 dz cos(3pi/9) = ln e^(1/3) or in English The integral of z squared dz from 1 to the square root of 3 times the cosine of 3 pi over 9 equals log of the cube root of e. ================================================================ "Better to have an approximate answer to the right question than a precise answer to the wrong question." John Tukey ================================================================ "Congress had inaugurated a simple test to determine the approximate age at which the soul entered the body: the ability to formulate higher math like algebra. Up to then, it was only body, animal instincts and body, animal reflexes and responses to stimuli. Like Pavlov's dogs when they saw a little water seep in under the door of the Leningrade laboratory; they "knew" but were not human." Philip Dick in the short story "The Pre-Persons", in the collection "The Golden Man". ================================================================ "He who understands a baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." Darwin, 1838. ================================================================ "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Richard Feynman ================================================================ "Genius is only a great aptitude for patience." Buffon ================================================================ "The Caliph Omar has been quoted as saying of the Library's holdings, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." 640 AD when Moslems took the city of Alexandria and burned the great library. ================================================================ "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work." John von Neumann ================================================================ "An attractive speculation from these juxtaposed observations is that the brain uses an enormous amount of extra capacity to do things that we have not yet learned how to do with computers." Thomas K. Landauer, from his paper "How much do people remember? Some estimates of the quantity of information in long-term memory", Cognitive Science 10:477-493 (1986). ================================================================ "The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear." President of the Linnean Society, during year of 1858 in which Darwin and Wallace presented their ideas on evolution. ================================================================ "I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense." Charles Darwin ================================================================ "Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to the subject, it doesn't bother you anymore." Arnold Sommerfeld ================================================================ "I am a millionaire in odd and useless facts." Charles Darwin ================================================================ "For every complex problem there is a simple, easy to understand, wrong answer" Szent-Georgyi ================================================================ "If it's green and it wiggles, it's Biology. If it stinks or explodes, it's Chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's Physics" Some poster ================================================================ "How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality?" Albert Einstein ================================================================ "Imagine an alien force, vastly more powerful than us, landing on Earth and demanding the value of R(5,5) or they will destroy our planet. In that case, we should marshal all our computers and our mathematicians and attempt to find the value. Suppose, instead, that they ask for R(6,6). In that case, we should attempt to destroy the aliens." Paul Erdos, about the difficulty of calculating Ramsey numbers R(m,n), the smallest number of people that guarantees that m will be mutual friends or n will be mutual strangers. ================================================================ "I am among those who think that science is a thing of great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not just a technician: he is also a child confronted with natural phenomena which dazzle him like a fairy tale." Marie Curie ================================================================ "When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision." Lord Falkland (1610-1643) ================================================================ "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." Bertrand Russell ================================================================ "Who would buy a digital camera with a fisheye lens and a 0.7 Kilo-Pixel chip, representing a whole hemisphere by a mere 26 x 26 pixels?" A. Borst, "Drosophila's View on Insect Vision", Current Biology 2009. ================================================================ "Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden; to cast a glance at the next advance in our science and at the secrets of its development during future centuries?" David Hilbert, 1900 address to the Second International Congress of Mathematicians when he outlined 23 problems confronting mathematics. ================================================================ "Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about." Douglas Adams in "Mostly Harmless", 1992. ================================================================ The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, but none in which a double positive makes a negative -- to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, "Yeah, yeah." ================================================================ For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ================================================================ "The smallest positive number not nameable in under eleven words." No such thing can exist, this is a classic example of an English phrase that is nonsensical. ================================================================ "When I read philosophy, I feel as if I'm trying to chew on something that isn't in my mouth." Einstein. ================================================================ "For every complicated physical phenomenomon, there is a simple wrong explanation" Tommy Gold ================================================================ "Omnis cellula e cellula" Rudolph Virchow, one of the great principles of biology. ================================================================ "Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose; ce que nous ignorons est immense." Pierre Simon de Laplace ================================================================ "Nullius in verba" Motto of the Royal Society of London, dont' take anybody's word for it. ================================================================ "Now I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." Mnemonic for first 15 digits of pi: ================================================================ "It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin ================================================================ "In preparing for battle, I have found that planning is essential, but plans are useless." Dwight Eisenhower ================================================================ "Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". Richard Feynman ================================================================ "The trouble with physics is that its deepest pronouncements are totally incomprehensible to almost everybody except the deepest physicists, and while the pronouncements may well be absolutely true, they are all pretty useless if my aim is to understand Escherichia coli. In biology it is the detail that counts, and it counts because that is what natural selection had to accomplish for there to be anything at all. We want to know which genes are turned out and exactly where and precisely when. To view natural selection as a kind of handwaving process that seeks refuge in glorious generalities when it cannot solve problems, is the anthropomorphic reflection of our own insufficiencies." Sidney Brenner, Current Biology Vol 7 No 7 ================================================================ "How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes go bored?" Calvin and Hobbes ================================================================ "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." J. von Neumann 1947 at ACM meeting ================================================================ "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." Donald Knuth ================================================================ "If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms==little particles that move around in perpentual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied." Richard Feynman, in the "Feynman Lectures on Physics", Vol I. ================================================================ "A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane." J. Willard Gibbs ================================================================ "A method is more important than a discovery, since the right method will lead to new and even more important discoveries." Lev Landau ================================================================ "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." Lord Rutherford ================================================================ "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." Edmund Burke ================================================================ "It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph...and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others." Mark Twain ================================================================ "The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from these laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts." P. W. Anderson, from his 1972 Science paper "More is different" ================================================================ "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it." Isaac Newton ======================================================== "The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation." P. Dirac (Proc. Roy Soc London 123:714:1929) ================================================================ There's a man and a flock of sheep, and another man comes by and says, "If I can guess the correct number of sheep in your flock, can I have one?" And the shepherd says, "Sure, try." And the man looks at the sheep and says "Eighty-three." And the shepherd is completely amazed, and the man picks up a sheep and starts to walk away, and the shepherd says "Hang on. If I guess your profession, can I have my sheep back?" And the man says, "Sure, try." "You must be a mathematical biologist." "How did you know?" "Because you picked up my dog." Attributed to Martin Nowak ================================================================= "One of the principle objects of theoretical research in any department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity." Josiah Willard Gibbs ================================================================= "Biologists observe things that cannot be explained. Theorists explain things that cannot be observed." Aharon Katchalsky ================================================================= "That crude matter should have originally formed itself according to mechanical laws, that life should have sprung from the nature of what is lifeless, that matter should have been able to dispose itself into the form of a self-maintaining purposiveness— that [is] contradictory to reason." Immanuel Kant ================================================================= "It can be a disadvantage rather than an advantage to be able to compute or to measure too accurately, since often what one measures or computes is irrelevant in terms of mechanism. After all, the perfect computation simply reproduces Nature, does not explain her." P. W. Anderson, Nobel speech. ================================================================= "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be." William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) [Popular lectures and addresses, Vol. 1, "Electrical Units of Measurement", 1883] ================================================================= "Moreover, we must confess that the perception, and what depends on it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is, through shapes and motions. If we image that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, as one enters into a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior we will only find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception." Gottfried Leibniz (1714) ================================================================= "New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in a new way. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained." Freeman Dyson, "Imagined Worlds" ================================================================= "This model was suggested to Ising by his thesis adviser, Lenz. Ising solved the one-dimensional model, ..., and on the basis of the fact that the one-dimensional model had no phase transition, he asserted that there was no phase transition in any dimension. As we shall see, this is false. It is ironic that on the basis of an elementary calculation and erroneous conclusion, Ising’s name has become among the most commonly mentioned in the theoretical physics literature. But history has had its revenge. Ising’s name, which is correctly pronounced “E-zing,” is almost universally mispronounced “I-zing.” Barry Simon ================================================================= "The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Francis Crick 1994 ================================================================= "If you were to watch me by day, you would see me sitting at my desk solving Schrodinger's equation ... exactly like my colleagues. But occasionally at night, when the full moon is bright, I do what in the physics community is the intellectual equivalent of turning into a werewolf I question whether quantum mechanics is the complete and ultimate truth about the physical universe." Anthony Leggett, Nobel prize winner ================================================================= ""No significant advance in the theory of matter in bulk has ever come about through derivation from microscopic principles. (...) I would confidently argue further that it is in principle and forever impossible to carry out such a derivation. (...) The so-called derivations of the results of solid-state physics from microscopic principles alone are almost all bogus, if 'derivation' is meant to have anything like its usual sense." Anthony Leggett, "On the nature of research in condensed-state physics", Foundations of Physics 1992 ================================================================= "Life may well be compared with these public Games for in the vast crowd assembled here some are attracted by the acquisition of gain, others are led on by the hopes and ambitions of fame and glory. But among them there are a few who have come to observe and to understand all that passes here. It is the same with life. Some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself. He seeks to uncover the secrets of nature. This is the man I call a philosopher for although no man is completely wise in all respects, he can love wisdom as the key to nature’s secrets." Pythagoras, as quoted in "Fermat's Enigma" by Simon Singh ================================================================= "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur Clarke's third law of prediction ================================================================= "All organized bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself." John Stuart Mill, "A System of Logic, 8e", Book III, Ch 6, Section 1. ================================================================= "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." Alfred Renyi ================================================================= "“What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning" Werner Heisenberg ================================================================= "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Carl Sagan 1980 ================================================================= "Festkörperphysik ist eine Schmutzphysik.” Wolfgang Pauli (solid-state physics is the physics of dirt) ================================================================= "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein ================================================================= "In approaching a new discipline it is a useful exercise to attempt to separate those topics that, although far from being understood, appear at least capable of explanation by familiar approaches of one kind or another from those for which no ready explanation, even in outline, seems available at the present time." Francis Crick in his Sci Am 1979 article, about the brain ================================================================= "A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth." Einstein in letter to Robert A. Thornton, 7 December 1944 ================================================================ "Those who deny the utility of philosophy, are doing philosophy." Aristotle ================================================================ Dirac anecdote: Dirac, having agreed to answer questions directly after he had given a talk, stood in silence after an audience member said he did not understand an equation that Dirac had written on the blackboard. When prompted by the chair of the session, Dirac responded: "that was a comment, not a question." ================================================================ “We believe that the world is knowable: that there are simple rules governing the behavior of matter and the evolution of the universe. We affirm that there are eternal, objective, extra-historical, socially-neutral, external and universal truths. The assemblage of these truths is what we call science, and the proof of our assertion lies in the pudding of its success.” Sheldon Glashow ================================================================ "What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all." A. Einstein ================================================================ "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music" Albert Einstein (Saturday Evening Post interview, 1929) ================================================================ "What I cannot create, I do not understand." R. Feynman. (On the blackboard in his office when he died in 1988) ================================================================ "We overestimate what can be done in three years and underestimate what can be done in ten." Saying in Silicon Valley ================================================================ "There is a growing community of theorists who want, as it were, more out of life. We want a theoretical physics of biological systems that reaches the level of predictive power that has become the standard in other areas of physics. We want to reconcile the physicists’ desire for concise, unifying theoretical principles with the obvious complexity and diversity of life. We want theories that engage meaningfully with the myriad experimental details of particular systems, yet still are derivable from principles that transcend these details." Bill Bialek, in his paper "Perspectives on theory at the interface of physics and biology", Rep. Prog Phys 2018 ================================================================ "Revolutions in science owe more to the clash of ideas than the steady accumulation of facts" John Wheeler ================================================================ "It has been said that science can be defined by as any discipline in which a fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by a genius of the last." From preface to book "Circuits of the Mind" by Leslie Valiant ================================================================ "Philosophy is like the mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences. Therefore, one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children so that they do not sink into philistinism." Einstein 1932 ================================================================ "I think that tastes, odors, colors and so on ... reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all of these quantities would be wiped away and annihilated." Galileo Galilei ================================================================ "It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man." Charles Darwin 1871 ================================================================ "We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes." Pierre Simon Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities", 1814 ================================================================ "As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery" Santiago Ramon y Cajal ================================================================= "A theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street." Joseph-Deiz Gergonne ================================================================= "Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity." Democritus ================================================================= "By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color, but in truth there are only atoms and the void." Democritus (c. 400 BC). ================================================================= "Actually, the beginning of modern science can be dated from the time when such general questions as, "How was the universe created? What is matter made of? What is the essence of life?" were replaced by such limited questions as "How does a stone fall? How does water flow in a tube? How does blood circulate in vessels?" This substitution had an amazing result. While asking general questions led to limited answers, asking limited questions turned out to provide more and more general answers." Francois Jacob in "Evolution and Tinkering", Science 1977. ================================================================= "This is why the probability is practically zero that living systems, which might well exist elsewhere in the cosmos, would have evolved into something looking like human beings. Even if life in outer space uses the same material as on the earth, even if the environment is not too different from ours, even if the nature of life and of its chemistry strongly limits the way to fulfill certain functions, the sequence of historical opportunities there could not be the same as here." Francois Jacob in "Evolution and Tinkering", Science 1977. ================================================================= "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. Darwin 1859, pp. 186–187 ================================================================= "The brain being indeed a machine, we must not hope to find its artifice through other ways other than those which are used to find the artifice of other machines. It thus remains to do what we would do for any other machine; I mean to dismantle it piece by piece and to consider what these can do separately and together. Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno, "On the Brain", 1669 ================================================================= Anecdote from a letter to Physics Today January 2021 from Paul Kolodner when he was at AT&T Bell Labs and the theoretical physicist Mark Azbel shared an office with Paul: "In the early 1980s, Mark spent several summers at Bell Labs, where he sat at the extra desk in my office. He was a friendly and soft-spoken man. One day, I came into the office, said hello, and sat down at my desk, with my back to him. He picked up the telephone and tapped a few numbers and I heard one side of an interesting conversation: "Hello, operator? I would like to make telephone call to Soviet Union please. "My name? Azbel "Azbel. A as in asparagus, Z as in Riemann zeta function, B as in Bogoliubov-Born-Green heory, E as in electron-phonon coupling, and L as in Landau damping." ================================================================= "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Theodosius Dobzhansky ================================================================= "Nothing in neurobiology makes sense except in light of behavior." Gordon Shepherd ================================================================= "From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce." Thomas Edison ================================================================= "At the age of 12, I experienced a second wonder of a totally different nature: in a little book dealing with Euclidean plane geometry, which came into my hands at the beginning of a school year. Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which – though by no means evident – could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression upon me. For example I remember that an uncle told me the Pythagorean Theorem before the holy geometry booklet had come into my hands. After much effort I succeeded in ‘proving’ this theorem on the basis of the similarity of triangles … for anyone who experiences [these feelings] for the first time, it is marvelous enough that man is capable at all to reach such a degree of certainty and purity in pure thinking as the Greeks showed us for the first time to be possible in geometry." Einstein ================================================================= "Science cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do." Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness ================================================================= "Another advantage of a mathematical statement is that it is so definite that it might be definitely wrong. Some verbal statements have not this merit; they are so vague they could hardly be wrong, and are correspondingly useless." Lewis Fry Richardson, "Mathematic of War and Foreign Politics" ================================================================= "Given the range of phenomena studied in neuroscience, demanding unity of viewpoint, methodology or depth of understanding, even in a single system, seems both unrealistic and counterproductive. Global understanding, when it comes, will likely take the form of highly diverse panels loosely stitched together into a patchwork quilt." Quote at end of paper "Conceptual and technical advances define a key moment for theoretical neuroscience" by A. Churchland and L. Abbott Nature Neuroscience 19:348–349 (2016) ================================================================= "A mature physicist, acquanting himself for the first time with the problems of biology, is puzzled by the circumstance that there are no 'absolute phenomena' in biology. Everything is time-bound and space-bound. The animal or plant or micro-organism he is working with is but a link in an evolutionary chain of changing forms, none of which has an permanent validity." Max Delbruck (Trans. Conn. Acad. Arts Sci. 38:173 1949) ================================================================= "Even God wouldn't get a grant today because somebody on the committee would say, oh those were very interesting experiments (creating the universe), but they’ve never been repeated. And then someone else would say, yes and he did it a long time ago, what’s he done recently? And a third would say, to top it all, he published it all in an un-refereed journal (The Bible)." Sydney Brenner 2014 ================================================================= "We are drowning in data but thirsty for knowledge." Sydney Brenner ================================================================= "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." Isaac Newton, said around 1720, after Newton lost most of his fortune in a stock market crash. ================================================================= "You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that." John von Neumann ================================================================= "If a thing exists, it exists in some amount; and if it exists in some amount, it can be measured." Edward Thorndike ================================================================= "Circles" by Carl Sandburg The white man drew a small circle in the sand And told the red man “This is what the Indian Knows” and drawing a big circle around the Small one, “This is what the white man knows.” The Indian took the stick and swept an immense Ring around both circles: “This is where the White man and the red man know nothing” ================================================================= "The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind." Charles Darwin 1871 ================================================================= "The excellence of the psychic machine does not increase with zoological hierarchy; instead one realizes that in fish and amphibians the nervous centers have undergone an unexpected simplification. Of course their grey-matter has increased considerably in mass; but when the structure of their brains is compared with that of bees or dragonflies, they are excessively plain, coarse and rudimentary. It is as if one were to pretend to hold as equals the merits of a rough grandfather clock with the quality of a fine pocket watch, a marvel of fineness, delicacy and precision. As always, in building her marvelous works, nature distinguishes herself much more in her tiny creations than in the large. Santiago Ramon y Cajal and Domingo Sanchez y Shanchez, 1915. ================================================================= "If it's not worth doing, it is not worth doing well." Donald Hebb =================================================================