“Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” Reply, according to Dr. Felix T. Smith of Stanford Research Institute, to a physicist friend who had said “I’m afraid I don’t understand the method of characteristics,” as quoted in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics …
Author Archives: saemiller
Sir John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh
“Examples … show how difficult it often is for an experimenter to interpret his results without the aid of mathematics.” Sir John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, Quoted in E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics, xvi.
Dr. von Karman
“Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month.,” November 1957 – Told to Joseph G. Martin, then Aide-de-Camp to Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Hooks, as Lt. Martin escorted Dr. von Karman from New …
Telegram for Meyer
“Mythologists and experimental theologians are needed for the development of a new method of attack” Telegram to Meyer while in trenches after recovery which was mistranslated from “Meteorologists and experimental physicists” where Meyer then traveled and met Fritz Haber (german Gas warfar pioneer)
Meyer
“It would be difficult to create the right mood under the present circumstances, but perhaps by accident another beautiful differential equation will come along again, as it once did when I worked with you.” Letter from Meyer to Prandtl, May 5, 1918. Ref. no. GOAR:2647, DLR-Gottingen Archives
Aurel Stodola
“The country (Germany) is like a man with a badly upset stomach who has not yet vomited enough,” Aurel Stodola in 1919 on right-wing putsch in Berlin two weeks earlier. CPAE Vol. 9 Dec. 16 “The Kapp Putsch, also known as the Kapp-Luttwitz Putsch after its leaders Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Luttwitz, was an …
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, …
William John Macquorn Rankine
“A hypothetical theory is necessary, as a preliminary step, to reduce the expression of the phenomena to simplicity and order before it is possible to make any progress in framing an abstractive theory,” William John Macquorn Rankine Outlines of the Science of Energetics, in Proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow (1855)
William John Macquorn Rankine
“Discrepancy between theory and practice, which in sound physical and mechanical science is a delusion, has a real existence in the minds of men; and that fallacy, through rejected by their judgments, continues to exert and influence over their acts,” William John Macquorn Rankine Introductory Lecture on the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics …
Richard Feynman
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” Richard Feynman “What is Science” presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320