Stephen Hawking, quoted in Wired ("Stephen Hawking's best quotes")
“A model is a good model if first it interprets a wide range of observations in terms of a simple and elegant model, and second if the model makes definite predictions that can be tested, and possibly falsified, by observation.”
Nero Wolfe, in Fer-de-Lance:
Must I again demonstrate that while it is permissible to request the scientist to lead you back over his footprints, a similar request of the artist is nonsense, since he, like the lark or the eagle, has made none?
The Guardian writes about the amazing comeback of Zahi Hawass ("Egypt's man from the past who insists he has a future"). Whether it's a comeback or just an unusually slow slide into prison is not yet clear (Hawass was sentenced to "a year hard labor" last month, but the sentence is not being carried out, yet). Whichever, the story is certainly interesting.
These quotes from the story contradicted each other in a revealingly humorous way:
"This is one of the most significant episodes in Egypt's history," says Hawass, who resigned his cabinet position three weeks after Mubarak's downfall, only to be reappointed a month later. "For the past 5,000 years we have been ruled by pharaohs, and on January 25 [the day the revolution erupted] we finally broke that chain."
...later...
"We have always needed a strongman; without one you have chaos. Look at what's happening at the moment. Times are troubled but I'm optimistic that the unpleasantness will end and success is around the corner." Whether he is referring to Egypt or himself is not clear.
From an article about exploring Saturn's moon, Titan, I have never in my life seen a scientist quote that sounds more like something Professor Frink would say:
"Waves on Titan's seas will be far larger, but much slower, than on earthly oceans, according to our calculations," said Professor John Zarnecki, of the Open University. "That suggests Titan is the best spot in the solar system for surfing. The only trouble is that the temperature there is -180C (-290F). Either way you look at it, it is clear the place is pretty cool."
HOYVIN-GLAVIN!
John McPhee, in Annals of the Former World (quoted in The Paris Review):
If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.
Jo Marchant elegizes an 1858 lecture by John Ruskin, on the topic of iron ("Not just any old iron"). I had to relay this quote:
"Is it not strange to find this stern and strong metal mingled so delicately in our human life that we cannot even blush without its help?"
I like this quote from Neil Stephenson, in his work, "In the beginning was the command line."
The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.
(quoted by Glenn Reynolds)
In John Noble Wilford's article about the new pre-Clovis archaeological site, Buttermilk Creek, Texas, James Adovasio gets the last word about advocates of the Clovis-first hypothesis:
“The last spear carriers will die without changing their minds,” Dr. Adovasio said.
Here's a quote from Ales Hrdlicka's report on "Lansing Man" -- a skeleton found near Lansing, Kansas in 1902, which was proposed as extremely early evidence of humans in the New World. Hrdlicka made it his business to examine such finds with a critical eye, he was the first physical anthropologist to espouse the theory that New World peoples reached the Americas by the Bering Strait route relatively recently.
The bones are quite hard and not very brittle; they are not sufficiently chalky to mark a blackboard. They fully preserve their structure and exhibit no visible traces of fossilization.
This just has me giggling. The thing is, I know exactly what he's talking about -- I've studied many skeletal remains where they would be chalky enough to mark a blackboard.
Writer-historian John Dos Passos, in the Paris Review, interviewed in 1968, referring to the academic treatment of modern literature:
The academic community is more likely to suffer from mass delusions than the general public. I don't know exactly why, but I suppose it's always been the case.
