In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the …
Category Archives: Quotes
Education, Frederick Douglass
To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being. Frederick Douglass
Maxwell
No I don’t. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell. Einstein when he was told he stood on Newton’s shoulders.
Book Collecting
I have known men to hazard their fortunes, go long journeys halfway about the world, forget friendship, even lie, cheat, and steal, all for the gain of a book. – A.S.W. Rosenbach, Books, and Bidders
Research Notes on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky In 1903, Tsiolkovsky wrote an article called, “Exploration of outer space by means of rocket devices,” in The Science Review. Born in September 1857 in the village of Izhevskoye, Russia, Tsiolkovsky was the fifth child in a …
Words and Virginia Woolf
Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light… That pause was …
Kelly Johnson on X-Plane Programs
Our present research airplanes have developed startling performance only by the use of rocket engines and flying essentially in a vacuum. Testing airplanes designed for transonic flight speeds at Mach numbers between 2 and 3 has proven, mainly, the bravery of the test pilots and the fact that where there is no drag, the rocket …
Deming and Statistics
In God we trust. All others must bring data. — W. Edwards Deming Deming revolutionized quality management with his emphasis on data-driven decision-making. His 1950s lectures on Statistical Product Quality Administration in Japan were instrumental in Japan’s post-war economic growth, helping it become the world’s second-largest economy. Deming was awarded the National Medal of Technology …
Madame Rousseau on d’Alembert
You will never be anything but a philosopher – and what is that but an ass who plagues himself all his life, that he may be talked about after he is dead. ~ Madame Rousseau on d’Alembert
Gödel and Time
$\mathrm{LL}$ cosmological solutions with non-vanishing density of matter known at present ${ }^1$ have the common property that, in a certain sense, they contain an “absolute” time coordinate, ${ }^2$ owing to the fact that there exists a one-parametric system of three-spaces everywhere orthogonal on the world lines of matter. It is easily seen that …