## 8. ACADEMIC LIFE

#### Subsections

- 8. academic life - general
- 8.1 rules for research
- 8.2 rules for writing an article
- 8.3 academic life poetry
- 8.4 research quotes
- 8.5 publish and explanation quotes
- 8.6 In the classroom
- 8.7 graduate students
- 8.8 exams
- 8.9 love life
- 8.10 students
- 8.11 staff
- 8.12 remarkable academic institutes

### 8.4 RESEARCH QUOTES

Index | Comments and Contributions | previous page

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    From: Vadim Zelenkov <zelenkov@gray.isir.minsk.by>
    Science is the best way to satisfy your own curiosity for the governmental
    account.
    	Soviet physicist Lev Artsimovich (1909-1973)

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    From: WINDERL@AgResearch.cri.nz (Louise Winder)

    'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
    discoveries, is not "Eureka!" ("I found it!") but rather "hmm....that's
    funny..."'  --   Isaac Asimov

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    Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will
    never achieve any results of the slightest value. -- Benjamin Jowett
    (1817-93), British theologian.

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    From: edftz@aol.com (Ed Fitzgerald)

    The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply
    the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.
     -- Philip W. Anderson "More Is Different"  Science magazine (1972)

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    Special Category: Charles Babbage
    Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
            - Charles Babbage (1792-1871)

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    From: jr3000@aol.com (JR3000)

     If a man will begin with certainties, he will end in doubts; but if he will be
    content to begin with doubts, he will end in certainties.
    -Francis Bacon (1561-1626),_Advancement of Learning_

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    May every young scientist remember and not fail to keep his eyes open for
    the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give
    consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important
    discovery.
      - Patrick Blackett (British physicist, 1897-1974)

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    Special Category: Niels Bohr
    Special Category: Definitions and terms
    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)

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    Special Category: Niels Bohr
    "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
    More from Bohr in the physics section

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    Special Category: Niels Bohr
    "Your theory is crazy...but it's not crazy enough to be true." -- Bohr

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    From: Joachim Verhagen
    Special Category: Niels Bohr
    No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.
                                              -- Niels Bohr

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    @A: Bronowski,Jacob (1908-1974)
    @Q: That is the essence of science: Ask an impertinent question, and you
        are on the way to a pertinent answer.
    @R: Ascent of man (1973) ch.4.

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    If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
    arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the
    physical world.  One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker
    entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. -- Vannevar Bush

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    From: "Frank Bohan" <franbo@globalnet.co.uk>
    Butler, Samuel (1612 - 1680)
    ... There can be no doubt about faith and not reason being the ultima ratio.
    Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of credulity
    as any writer who ever lived, cannot get beyond this. He has no demonstrable
    first premise. He requires postulates and axioms which transcend
    demonstration, and without which he can do nothing. His superstructure
    indeed is demonstration, but his ground his faith. Nor again can he get
    further than telling a man he is a fool if he persists in differing from
    him. He says "which is absurd," and declines to discuss the matter further.
    Faith and authority, therefore, prove to be as necessary for him as for
    anyone else.
    The Way of All Flesh.

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    From: CRITESS@delphi.com (Susan Crites/CRITESS)

    As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and
    I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a
    scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
    -- Matt Cartmill

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    Special Category: Arthur C. Clarke
                         CLARKE'S LAWS
    Arthur C. Clarke (1917-)

    When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
    possible, he is almost certainly right.  When he states that something
    is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
                       _Profiles of the Future_ (1962; rev. 1973)
                      ``Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination''
                                                  Clarke's First Law
    On which he commented:

    Perhaps the adjective ``elderly'' requires definition.  In physics,
    mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other
    disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties.
    There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher
    just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for
    nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the
    laboratory!
                     _Profiles of the Future_ (1962; rev. 1973)
                     ``Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination''

    But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to
    venture a little way past them into the impossible.
               _Profiles of the Future_ (1962; rev. 1973)
              ``Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination''
                                                  Clarke's Second Law

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
                     _Profiles of the Future_ (1962; rev. 1973)
                    ``Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination''
                                                  Clarke's Third Law

    Clarke adds: As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have
    modestly decided to stop there.

    A post with the ``first law'' invariably gets followed up with one
    mentioning this:

    When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced
    by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with
    great fervor and emotion--the distinguished but elderly scientists are
    then, after all, probably right.
                               Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
                      _Fantasy & Science Fiction_ 1977 [magazine]
                         In answer to Clarke's First Law

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    Special Category: Charles Darwin
    I love fools' experiments; I am always making them
     - Charles Darwin (1809-1882, British biologist)

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    A fool ... is a man who never tried an experiment in his life.
      -- Erasmus Darwin (1711-1802, English physician, grandfather of Charles
    Darwin)

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    In Science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the
    man to whom the idea first occurs.
    In: Eugenetics Review (April 1914 "Francis Galton")
      -- Sir Francis Darwin (1848-1925, English botanist, son of Charles
    Darwin)

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    From the Sanity Inspector (chollanamdo@mindspring.com)
    Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide
    me.  A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out
    your candle in order to find your way more clearly.'  This stranger is a
    theologian.
            --Diderot, c1762

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    Special Category: Paul Dirac
    From: marlow@concentric.com (marlowe)

    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 .  -- Paul Dirac

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    From: dougk
    That's the nature of research - you don't know what in hell you're
    doing.
    	--Harold "Doc" Edgerton

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    Special Category: Thomas Edison

    From: FCB <fbaer@mci.newscorp.com>
    Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your
    idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you're working
    on. - Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

    Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand
    things that won't work. - Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

    Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
    -- Thomas Alva Edison (American Inventor,1847-1931) (said c. 1903, written
    in Harper's Monthly Magazine, September 1932)

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    Special Category: Albert Einstein
    A scientist is a mimosa when he himself has made a mistake, and a roaring
    lion when he discovers a mistake of others.
    -- Albert Einstein, quoted in Ehlers, Liebers Hertz.

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    From: "João M. N. Batista" <df20728@einstein.cc.fc.ul.pt>
    Special Category: Paul Erdös
    I took this quote from a lecture by Prof. Sir Michael Berry (from Bristol
    U., I think...). It's from Paul Erdos  (Hungarian mathematician, 1913-1996)
    and it read:

    "A problem worthy of attacks
    Proves its worth by hitting back."

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    From: joachim.verhagen@xs4all.nl
    Source: Paul Hoffman, de man die van 9etallen hield, 1998
    Special Category: Paul Erdös
    Végre nem butulok tovább (Finally, I will not become any dumber)
    Paul Erdös (Hungarian mathematician, 1913-1996) epitaph for himself.

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    Special Category: Enrico Fermi
    From: neve@up.univ-mrs.fr (Gabriel NEVE)

    "Experimental   confirmation   of   a   prediction  is  merely  a
    measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery."
           -- Enrico Fermi, Italian physicist, 1901-1954

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    Special Category: Richard Feynman
    From: Steve Cutchen <scutchen@arco.com>
    @A   Richard Feynman *
    @Q       First you guess.  Don't laugh, this is the most important step.
         Then you compute the consequences.  Compare the consequences to
         experience.  If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong.
         In that simple statement is the key to science.  It doesn't matter
         how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is.
         If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong.  That's all there is to it.
    @D   The quote is from a PBS show on Dr. Feynman.  He was describing to his
         class how to look for a new law of physics

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    Special Category: Richard Feynman
    Special Category: Definitions and terms
    From: Nicolas Martin <nicolas@martinworld.com>
    Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.
    ------ Richard Feynman, American physicist

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    Special Category: Richard Feynman
    From: David C Kifer <dkifer@sky-access.com>

    A philosopher once said "It is necessary for the very existence of science
    that the same conditions always produce the same results."  Well, they do not.
    -- Richard Feynman, _The Character of Physical Law_

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    Special Category: Richard Feynman
    From: Steve Cutchen <scutchen@arco.com>
    @A   Richard Feynman
    @Q   I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers
         are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial
         intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial
         intelligence

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    Special Category: Richard Feynman
    "...it doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how
    smart you are -- if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."  --
    R.P. Feynman

    "It doesn't matter how beautiful your experiment is, it doesn't matter how
    carefully you collect your data -- if it is based upon a faulty
    understanding of what is being tested, it's most likely useless."  --
    L.D. Hosford :-)

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    Special Category: Galileo Galilei

    "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with
    sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."  -- Galileo
    Galilei

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    Special Category: Galileo Galilei

    "It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those
    who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how
    to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature,
    no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully
    understand."  - Galileo Galilei

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    Special Category: Galileo Galilei

    "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is
     to discover them." - Galileo Gililei

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    God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets
    of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and
    boredom.  - Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von; 1749-1832), German poet and
    dramatist.

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    Special Category: Werner Heisenberg
    Special Category: Definitions and terms
     Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976; German physicist)
    An Expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made
    in his subject and who manages to avoid them.  (Ein Fachman is ein Mann,
    der einige der gröbsten Fehler kennt, die man in dem betreffenden Fach
    machen kann und der sie deshalb zu vermeiden versteht.  In: Der Teil und
    das Ganze (1969).

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    From: Don Westerheijden <d.f.westerheijden@cheps.utwente.nl>
     Einstein didn't go around racking his brain, muttering to himself, "How,
    oh how, can I come up with a Great Idea?" [...] The bottom line is that
    invention is much more like falling off a log than like sawing one in two.
    -- Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themes, p. 233

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    From: bouche2@server.uwindsor.ca (Boucher David)

    It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
    Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories
    instead of theories to suit facts."     - Sherlock Holmes

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    Why think?  Why not try the experiment?
     -- John Hunter (letter to Edward Jenner)

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    The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an
    ugly fact. - T H Huxley (English scientist, 1887-1975)

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    From: charles@jolt.mpx.com.au (Charles Cave)

    Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for
    further development.     -- Julius Sextus Frontinus
                            (Highly regarded engineer in Rome, 1st century A.D.)

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    From: dougk
    Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur.
    He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an
    amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of
    trouble, so that makes him a professional.
    	--Charles Franklin Kettering

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    Landau, Susan:
    There's a touch of the priesthood in the academic world, a sense that a
    scholar should not be distracted by the mundane tasks of day-to-day
    living. I used to have great stretches of time to work. Now I have research
    thoughts while making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sure it's
    impossible to write down ideas while reading "curious George" to a
    two-year-old. On the other hand, as my husband was leaving graduate school
    for his first job, his thesis advisor told him, "You may wonder how a
    professor gets any research done when one has to teach, advise students,
    serve on committees, referee papers, write letters of recommendation,
    interview prospective faculty. Well, I take long showers."

    In Her Own Words: Six Mathematicians Comment on Their Lives and
    Careers. Notices of the AMS, V. 38, no. 7 (September 1991), p. 704

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    Langer, Rudoph E.
    [about Fourier] It was, no doubt, partially because of his very disregard
    for rigor that he was able to take conceptual steps which were inherently
    impossible to men of more critical genius.

    In P. Davis and R. Hersh The Mathematical Experience, Boston: Birkhäuser,
    1981.

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    From: Don Olivier <don@hsph.harvard.edu>
    The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and
    inaccurate.  Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity
    and the desire to do good.  The latter is put high above the former, and
    yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race
    has yet produced: the scientific investigator.  What actually urges him on
    is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological
    thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret....  His prototype
    is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the
    fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
             -- H. L. Mencken

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    From: jr3000@aol.com (JR3000)

    ORIGINALITY:
    A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds. --Mark Twain

    In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come
    back to us with a certain alienated majesty. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Accept your genius and say what you think. --Emerson

    From: ldiaz@ix.netcom.com (LTD)

    Who never walks save where he sees men's tracks makes no discoveries.
      --J.G. Holland

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    It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet
    hypothesis every day before breakfast -  It keeps him young.
    Original German:
    Überhaupt is es für den Forscher ein guter morgensport, tãglich vor dem
    Frühstück eine lieblingshypothese einzustampfen - das erhãhlt jung.
    -- Konrad Lorenz (Austro-German zoologist, 1903-1998)
    In: Das Sogenante Böse (1963)

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    From: chollanamdo@mindspring.com (The Sanity Inspector)

    	It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn
    there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of
    science as imagination.  Find me a people whose early medicine is not
    mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people
    devoid of all scientific ability.
    	--C.S. Peirce, c1900

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    From: dougk
    Motto for a research laboratory: What we work on today, others will
    first think of tomorrow.
    	--Alan Perlis

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    Special Category: Jules Henry Poincaré
    From: amills@acpub.duke.edu (Anita Mills)

    It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.
      - Henri Poincare

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    From: Antonio Almeida <aalmeida@lemac18.lemac.ist.utl.pt>
    "Science is built upon facts, as a house is built of stones;
     but an accumulation of facts is no more a science that a heap
     of stones is a house."       -- Henri Poincare' in Science and Hypothesis

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    I didn't think; I experimented.
     - Wilhelm Roentgen (German physicist, 1845-1923)

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    Special Category: Ernest Rutherford

    You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than
    about 10^12 to 1. -- Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand physicist (1871-1937)

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    Special Category: Ernest Rutherford
    We haven't got the money, so we've got to think!
      -- Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand physicist (1871-1937) in Bulletin of
    the Institute of Physics (1962) vol 13 (as recalled by R.V. Jones)

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    From: dougk
    To do successful research, you don't need to know everything, you just need
    to know of one thing that isn't known.
              --Arthur Schawlow

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    Special Category: James Dewey Watson
    From: dougk
    Formula for breakthroughs in research: Take young researchers, put them
    together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of
    freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.
    	--James D. Watson

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    From: edftz@aol.com (Ed Fitzgerald)

    The pop artist Andy Warhol once approached me at a party and told me that
    he collected scientific journals, but he couldn't understand them. He
    drifted away, then came back and said, "Do you mind if I ask you a
    question?" "Of course not," I replied. He asked, "why does science take so
    long?" I said, "Mr. Warhol, when you do a picture of Marilyn Monroe, does
    it have to be exactly like her, as close to being her as you can make it?"
    He said, "Oh no. And anyhow, I have this place called the Factory where my
    helpers do it." I said, "Well, in science it has to be exact, as exact as
    you can make it." He looked at me with limp sympathy and said, "Isn't that
    terrible?"
     -- Gerald M. Edelman _Bright Air, Brilliant Fire_ (1992)

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    @A: Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
    @Q: Experimental work is the most tedious thing in the world (unless it be
    the reports of it in the _philosophical transactions_).
    @R: The food of the gods (1904)

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    From: Serenleono (verax@mindspring.com)

    Science is a match that man has just got alight.  He thought he was in a
    room -- in moments of devotion, a temple -- and that his light would be
    reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and
    pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony.  It is a
    curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the
    flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and
    the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that
    human comfort and beauty he anticipated -- darkness still.

          -- H. G. Wells, "The Rediscovery of the Unique",
             THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, N. S. 50 (July 1891).

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    Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not
    discover it.
    -- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) [English philosopher and mathematician]

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    From: rcl@cycor.ca (Richard Lubbock)

    "It is a short step from a careless phrase to a flash of insight."
            - A.N. Whitehead [Process and Reality (Corrected edn) p 60.]

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    Special Category: Eugene Wigner
    @A: Wigner, Eugene Paul. Hungarian/US physicist (1902-1995)
    @Q:     There is no natural phenomenon that is comparable with the sudden
        and apparently accidentally timed development of science, except
        perhaps the condensation of a super-saturated gas or the explosion of
        some unpredictable explosives.  Will the fate of science show some
        similarity to one of these phenomena?.
    @R: In an essay ``The Limits of Science'' intended to estimate them,
    originally in Procs. of the _Amer. Philosophical Soc._ v. 94, #5 (1950).

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    From: drory@buphyk.bu.edu (Alon Drory)

    Furious activity is no substitute for understanding -- H. H. Williams

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    From: shumard@ucssun1.sdsu.edu (shumard)

    Science is a differential equation.  Religion is a boundary condition.

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    From: Joachim Verhagen

    Reductionism is not everything.

    Ph. thesis Mario van der Stelt (source: Illuster, translated from Dutch)

next page | Index | Comments and Contributions

#### Subsections

- 8. academic life - general
- 8.1 rules for research
- 8.2 rules for writing an article
- 8.3 academic life poetry
- 8.4 research quotes
- 8.5 publish and explanation quotes
- 8.6 In the classroom
- 8.7 graduate students
- 8.8 exams
- 8.9 love life
- 8.10 students
- 8.11 staff
- 8.12 remarkable academic institutes

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