Under the Microscope: I thought we might relax with a little laugh before I get too far into the academic year and I list below a series of scientific quotations that make their points in a witty manner, writes Prof William Reville.
"A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation. Elephants, for instance. Once molecules have learnt to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming the countryside . . . Some of the things resembling elephants will be men." Peter William Atkins, 1940, in The Creation Revisited, Penguin (1994).
"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." Samuel Butler, British novelist (1835-1902). In Life and Habit, 1877.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (British geneticist, writer and atheist, 1892-1964) was asked late in his life whether his studies had taught him anything about God that he might care to share. He answered: "He seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles."
"The species of whale known as the black right whale has four kilos of brains and 1,000 kilos of testicles. If it thinks at all, we know what it is thinking about." Jon Lien, "Whale Professor" at St John's University, Newfoundland, speaking to the Norwegian Telegram Agency in 1995.
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry." HL Mencken (1880-1956), US journalist, satirist and literary critic.
"The best model of a cat is another cat or, better, the cat itself." Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), US mathematician.
"People are DNA's way of making more DNA." Edward O Wilson, (1929-). Distinguished US biologist.
"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field." Neils Bohr (1922-1962). Danish Nobel Laureate physicist.
"I know that this defies the law of gravity, but, you see, I never studied law." Bugs Bunny.
"On being asked what he meant by the beauty of a mathematical theory of physics, Dirac replied that if the questioner was a mathematician then he did not need to be told, but were he not a mathematician then nothing would be able to convince him of it." Freeman J Dyson, (1923-). Physicist and mathematician.
"I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709, 366,231,425, 076, 185,631,031,296 protons in the universe and the same number of electrons." Sir Arthur Eddington, (1882-1944), British Astrophysicist. The Philosophy of Physical Science (Cambridge, 1939).
The doctoral student Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider asked Einstein in 1919 how he would have reacted if his general theory of relativity had not been confirmed experimentally that year by Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson. His answer was: "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct anyway."
"The next question was - what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward." Richard Feynman (1918-1988). In The Character Of Physical Law, Modern Library (1994).
"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation." Richard Feynman.
"What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school . . . It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it . . . That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does." Richard Feynman. QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, (London, 1990).
"My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all." Stephen Hawking, (1942-). British physicist.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." (Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895).
"At what point does the dissipation of energy begin?" Lord Kelvin's response to his wife's suggestion of an afternoon walk.
"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind." Thomas Hewitt Key, (1799-1875), Punch Vol 29, 19, 1855.
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." Wolfgang Pauli, Austrian physicist, (1900-1958). On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague.
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand physicist (1871-1937), Winner, Nobel Prize Chemistry (1908).
"If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Carl Sagan, US physicist and astronomer (1934-1999).
"If you want to be a physicist, you must do three things - First, study mathematics, second, study more mathematics, and third, do the same." Arnold Sommerfeld, German physicist (1868-1951).
"It was absolutely marvellous working for Pauli. You could ask him anything. There was no worry that he would think a particular question was stupid, since he thought all questions were stupid." Victor Frederick Weisskopf (1908-2002) Austria-American physicist.
"What Einstein said wasn't all that stupid." Wolfgang Pauli as a student, after hearing Einstein, 20 years his senior, give a lecture.
"Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them." Eugene Wigner (1902-1995). Hungarian-American physicist.
William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC http://understandingscience.ucc.ie