C-THIS QUOTE OF THE MONTH (now recent first!)
This site is a hobby containing random space art, traditional pictures and thoughts about science and related subjects, all of which I have created. Part of the site also contains an old magazine.
C-This Quote Of The Month 1st March 2010
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself. "
Galileo Galilei (video link here is great and music super. Has iyt got anything to do with this months quote? Well yes.)http://www.topgear.com/uk/videos
C-This Quote Of The Month 1st Feb 2010
".“The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.”"
Tom Bodett
C-This Quote Of The Month 1st Jan 2010
"...so as I go by, I look over and on the ground over here, there's a big piece of foil, and so I said boy, this foil would be even more fun and I watched it go up and up and up, more than anybody could ever throw a ball, even an olympic athlete couldn't throw anything as high as I could on the Moon..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_BeanBy Alan Bean, a former NASA astronaut and engineer, who became the fourth person to walk on the moon in November 1969. Alan Bean resigned from NASA in June 1981 to devote his full time to paintinghttp://www.alanbeangallery.com/. Quote taken from 'James May On The Moon', Part 5 (see link below). (This quote has inspired me to write about what it means to throw a piece of foil up in the air, on the Moon. See Harvard page for that quite soon.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Kngxv-gtI&feature=related
C-This Quote Of The Month December 1st 2009
" They say a restless body can hide a peaceful soul. A voyager, ad a settler, they both have a distant goal. If I explore the heavens, or if I search inside. Well, it really doesn't matter as long as I can tell myself I've always tried"
By Abba - very lovely words in this song, and the song is really good. In the video for it (see link below) you can see a couple of planets in it too. Very fitting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc7b_cEE7ys&feature=related
C-This Quote Of The Month November 1st 2009
"Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind. "
By Henri Frédéric Amiel (September 27, 1821 – May 11, 1881) was a Swiss philosopher, poet and critic.
C-This Quote Of The Month October 1st 2009
"Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically — but...let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now."
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb - a literary essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance. Taken from "Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics"
C-This Quote Of The Month September 1st 2009
"The most difficult subjects can be explained to most slow-witted man if he hasn't formed any idea of them already but the simplest can't be made clear to most intelligent man if he's firmly persuaded that he knows already."
From Tolstoy - a Russian writer
C-This Quote Of The Month August 1st 2009
"Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into a sun in the daytime. "
From Kid's ideas about science
C-This Quote Of The Month July 1st 2009
"Bayesian decision theory points to subjective utility functions and subjective prior probabilities that cannot be avoided when making decisions in the face of uncertainty"
By Stephen P. Smith PhD from joint idea with Stephen and myselfhttp://www.emergentmind.org/smith.htm
C-This Quote Of The Month June 1st 2009
"I guess a blind man will intuitively choose a quantum-mechanical description with states whose phase varies with time and location, with probabilities, with uncertainties, with interference patterns, etc. Teaching him to describe the world classically would be counter-intuitive because he cannot continuously know the position of the objects. He has to infer it with square state (blind stick projected on detected object) probabilities. Paradoxically, we could say that quantum mechanics is best understood when you're blind... "
Common sense quantum Physicist and Engineer, Arjen Dijksman. The link here provides the correct context for Arjen's thinking.http://commonsensequantum.blogspot.com/2009/04/quantum-mechanics-is-best-understood.html
C-This Quote Of The Month May 1st 2009
"Cars have become safer in many ways, but airbags can hurt you anyway"
Can we predict logical problems? Anders Sandberg's in quote here about 'Memory modifiction', taken from his distributed brain essays on technology, science and the human condition.http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/04/index.html
C-This Quote Of The Month April 1st 2009
"Change your thoughts and you change your world. "
Norman Vincent Peale - US clergyman; wrote "The Power of Positive Thinking" 1952
C-This Quote Of The Month March 1st 2009
" To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge. "
Copernicus. Polish Astronomer, 1473-1543
C-This Quote Of The Month February 1st 2009
"Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards. "
Astronomer Fred Hoyle
C-This Quote Of The Month Jan 1st 2009
" That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
Dr. Carl Sagan quotes (American Astronomer, Writer and Scientist, 1934-1996)
C-This Quote Of The Month December 1st 2008
"Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. "
Buckminster Fuller
C-This Quote Of The Month November 1st 2008
"Content makes poor men rich; discontentment makes rich men poor. "
Benjamin Franklin on Happiness
C-This Quote Of The Month October 1st 2008
"Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they're there."
Kid's Ideas About Science
C-This Quote Of The Month September 1st 2008
"It shows there is nothing nerdy about people who study astronomy and physics. In fact, the motivation for making music and for studying science both come from the same thing - a kind of emotional curiosity about the world and what makes it, and you, work."
- Brian Cox, a physics professor at Manchester University, on Brian May's PhD on space dust, Astronomy-from the timesonline wesbsite.
C-This Quote Of The Month August 1st 2008
"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it."
Henry Ford
C-This Quote Of The Month July 1st 2008
"Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers."
From -Kid's ideas about science-
C-This Quote Of The Month June 1st 2008
"He worries cosmologists are creating theories based on a very limited observations and mathematics because they don't, and may never, understand the big picture"
From the Radio Times, what Jane Fletcher, BBC producer of The Sky at Night, said about Sir Patrick Moore's angle on modern theories, on his recent celebration of the BBC programme The Sky at Night (this one I attended, see intro page)
C-This Quote Of The Month May 1st 2008
"You're in this world where you're in your head but you're connected to something wonderful around you. They're both indescribable experiences. I remember thinking, when I was quite young, if all there is to life is just staying alive, then why would we bother? Life has to be about more than just being. There has to be something higher. And to me the higher things are exactly these; music and art, beautiful images, and thoughts of the way things work. I love that. Moments of discovery."
Brian May (ex band member of Queen) on Astronomy being interviewed by THE GUARDIAN
C-This Quote Of The Month April 1st 2008
"I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing. "
A answer from a child in a science test
C-This Quote Of The Month March 1st 2008
"The picture looks very complicated, but with a little practice one can make free-hand sketches which are quite accurate. "
From the book, Electromagnetism For Engineers - An Introductory Course, by P. Hammond, pages 56-57 subject, 3.10 THE METHOD OF CURVILINEAR SQUARES (I have been reading this book the last few years, and so far, my favourite out of a collection of 81 elementary and higher text books I own on the subject of physics.)
C-This Quote Of The Month Feb 1st 2008
"Animals speak more wisely with their eyes than people do with their mouths"
Ludovic Halevy
C-This Quote Of The Month Jan 1st 2008
"There is nothing that cannot be explained, but there are wrong insights that can lead to explanations that are identical to the explanation for a correct but rather subtle insight."
PIET HUT, Professor of Astrophysics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (from Edge Magazine Jan 2008)
C-This Quote Of The Month December 1st
"Clouds just keep circling the earth around and around. And around. There is not much else to do."
From -Kid's ideas about science-(I had previously mistakenly referenced these two last quotes by Discover Magazine which I often read. ) I can't find the source.
C-This Quote Of The Month November 1st
"When people run around and around in circles we say they are crazy. When planets do it we say they are orbiting. "
From -Kid's ideas about science-
C-This Quote Of The Month October 1st
" ...you may wish to know that Oppenheimer, upon learning that two of his friends were reading Dante in the original, also spent a month to learn enough Italian to read Dante outloud to them. Dirac was unimpressed, and told him he was wasting his time. Indeed, Dirac one time refused a couple of books that Oppenheimer offered him since “reading books interfered with thought”."
Commentor LDM, replied on 'Not Even Wrong' Blog by Peter Woit
C-This Quote Of The Month September 1st
"The large-scale homogeneity of the universe makes it very difficult to believe that the structure of the universe is determined by anything so peripheral as some complicated molecular structure on a minor planet orbiting a very average star in the outer suburbs of a fairly typical galaxy"
Steven Hawking
C-This Quote Of The Month August 1st
"If we live to-day in the midst of worlds full of wonder, it is because men of science have taken for their own different things to study. They have been a team working upon many subjects"
From my book called "The Wonder Book of Science"
C-This Quote Of The Month July 1st
"The trouble with all investigations into zoology is that we have only one standard, and that is our own. We are unable to apprectiate how far other animals think and how they feel when they react to stimuli"
From my "The Wonder Book of Science" book, section Instinct and Reasoning. (This book was my first introduction to science age 7). I will quote more from it in August.
C-This Quote Of The Month June 1st
"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book."
Groucho Marx
C-This Quote Of The Month May 1st
"you cant change the wind but you can ajust your sail"
anonymous
C-This Quote Of The Month April 1st
"Whatever you can do or dream, begin it."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
C-This Quote Of The Month March 1st 2007
"."...................................................................... "
by blank space
C-This Quote Of The Month Feb 1st 2007
"We have to think to and build together new connections between thought and intuition, exactness and imagination, research and creativity, art and science, which are together (and only together) the driving forces behind a new Humanism. A more educated, open-minded and pluralistic Humanism. The beauty and the depth of our thought have to become unavoidable elements of our life. Science should speak a language which is understandable and "beautiful" and has to come nearer and nearer to Arts."
VITTORIO BO - Director, Festival Della Scienzia, Genova, on "WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?" from edge.org
C-This Quote Of The Month Jan 1st 2007 HAPPY NEW YEAR!
"00100100111100010010001010100010010 "
A computer
C-This Quote Of The Month December 1st 2006
""In chaos theory, the edge is the meeting point between order and chaos, between the known and the unknown. In nature it is where creativity and self-organizing happen. It is where new information is created." "
Dana Zohar & Ian Marshall
C-This Quote Of The Month November 1st 2006
" “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking”"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
C-This Quote Of The Month October 1st 2006
"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. "
Buckminster Fuller
C-This Quote Of The Month September 1st 2006
"Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality "
Werner Heisenberg
C-This Quote Of The Month August 1st 2006
"I wish I knew how these elements combined to create anew idea. It would be wonderful to produce some kind of scientific formula that reliably resulted in a best selling product or breathtaking invention. However, given that so much of the process seems to take place in the unconscious, and somewhat mysterious, way, I suspect that a formula will forever be beyond our grasp. "
By Professor Richard Wiseman on creativity, who holds Britain’s only chair in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. From www.spaceforideas site
C-This Quote Of The Month July 1st 2006
"Here is the shadow of a dream
Ideas possess the creativity team
Silhouettes dance in a fire,
A single thought can never tire. "
By © Dennis Perrin & Edward de Bono Creative Team 1999
C-This Quote Of The Month June1st 2006
"A computer isn't smart enough to make a mistake"
Unknown
C-This Quote Of The Month May 1st 2006
""What do scientists and artists have in common? They see reality in new ways. While everyone else saw a pendulum swinging back and forth, Galileo saw it falling and rising."
New Scientist, 29th Oct 05
C-This Quote Of The Month April 1st 2006
"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."
Erich Fromm
C-This Quote Of The Month March 1st 2006
"The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it. "
P. B. Medawar (1915 - )
C-This Quote Of The Month Feb 1st 2006
"In my own work I have to say that I work completely on the basis of intuition. It's totally irrational. In creating a new field of mathematics you have to work completely on instinct. You're looking for new concepts. You are working with unconscious emotions and it's a magic, mysterious process. Once you come up with an idea, a new idea on which to base a new field of mathematics, then there is, I agree, a rational element in mathematics which is that you have to verify that the idea works. But the act of creation in mathematics is just as magical and mysterious as the act of artistic creation. I would also say that mathematics and art are much more similar than people realize, in that I would say that mathematics is an art. I would say that good mathematical ideas have to be beautiful'"
-transcript of a talk given July 2001 at a meeting to Bridge the Gap between the sciences and the arts by Gregory J. Chaitin who is a mathematician at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Buenos Aires and at the University of Auckland
C-This Quote Of The Month Jan 1st 2006
"'Some people would rather die than think."
Bertrand Russell
C-This Quote Of The Month December 1st 2005
"Mistakes are an important part of the thought process"
- New Scientist's Special Issue article (Oct 29th 05, page 45) "Creative Minds", on Timothy Gowers, Rouse Ball professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge
C-This Quote Of The Month November 1st 2005
"Science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the boderline between the two respective domains. "
M.C. Escher
C-This Quote Of The Month October 1st 2005
"Archimedes then showed them his method (BOX 1), which depended upon cutting solids into infinitely thin slices and hanging the slices on a balance. "Hmmph," said Kink. "Doesn't seem very logical to me." "Definitely fallacious," admitted Pox. "Yet it works," said Archimedes. "Funny old world, isn't it?" "
Professor IAN STEWART from "Do Mathematicians Think Logically?" (Ian is featured on this site)
C-This Quote Of The Month September 1st 2005
"Take a look around you, at the world we've come to know. Does it seem to be much more, than a crazy circus show? But maybe from the madness, something beautiful will grow..."
from War Of the Worlds
C-This Quote Of The Month August 1st 2005
"The future's for discovering. The space in which we're travelling "
by lead singer Chris Martin from the track Square One from the X+Y album by Coldplay
C-This Quote Of The Month July 1st 2005
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
Theodore Roosevelt
C-This Quote Of The Month June 1st 2005
"People only get lost in thought because it is unfamiliar territory"
Paul Fix
C-This Quote Of The Month May 1st 2005
"Nature tends to be more creative than we are"
Alvaro de Rújula from CERN the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the world's largest particle physics centre.
C-This Quote Of The Month April 1st 2005
"So many of us start off dreaming about a wonderfull life that is wild and free, but that's usually a long way from where we actually end up"
By Bradley Trevor Greive from - The Meaning of Life
C-This Quote Of The Month March 1st 2005
"If you don't think, you can stay alive only by being a parasite on the thinking of others"
It's actually David King (oops the last name I put was wrong!)
C-This Quote Of The Month Feb 2005
"In spite of our feelings of invincibility and immortality our existence is far more tenuous than we might think"
Bradley Trevor Greive from - The Meaning of Life
C-This Quote Of The Month Jan 2005
(I looked for a quote for about half an hour or more, to reflect the recent tsunami tragedy that occured. Whether this quote is appropriate I am not sure, but it seemd calming to read, so I hope it's ok)
"It is a quiet and peaceful place - and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. "
Robert D. Ballard