QUOTATIONS

  "There is in the chemist a form of thought by which all ideas become visible in the mind as the strains of an imagined piece of music" (Justus von Liebig)
[29 December 2008 - 4 January 2009]

  "We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting" (John Updike, Rabbit Redux)
[5-11 January 2009]

  "The aesthetics of natural sciences and mathematics is at one with the aesthetics of music and painting - both inhere in the discovery of a partially concealed pattern" (Herbert Simon)
[12-18 January 2009]

  "What has rank to do with the process of creative discovery in science? Very little. What has rank to do with the politics of science and the allocation of credit for discoveries? Almost everything" (Peter Lawrence)
[19 January - 1 February 2009]

  "El paper de cel.lulosa,
llargues cadenes de polialcohols creuades,
parts cristal.lines (amb fenòmens d'absorció),
parts amorfes,
desfici de canalicles per on s'escampa l'aigua.
Si el cremes et queden les cendres,
restes d'impureses metàl.liques.
Ben tintat, sobre el paper, el poema.
Amat o amada no esqueixis
la seva fragilitat" *
(Angel Terron, Iniciació a la química)
[2-8 February 2009]
* Sorry, no translation this week. But feel free to try... and send it to me

  "It is regrettable that among scientists the presentation of ideas is not as highly valued as the creation of ideas. This is in stark contrast to music, where the performer is a partner equal to the composer" (V.F. Weisskopf , The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist)
[9-15 February 2009]

  "Thinking outside the box, without offending those still residing in it, is difficult" (D. White, Kulturissimo, 75, 37, 2009)
[16 February - 1 March 2009]

  "In science, being brilliant is clearly no guarantee of being correct" (B.J. Carr)
[2-15 March 2009]

  "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the siliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible" (Bertrand Russel)
[16-22 March 2009]

  ".. not to mention my colleagues, without whose help I could still have done it anyway..." (From a cartoon by Austin, New Scientist, 4/11/1989, p. 47)
[23-29 March 2009]

  "Ah! don't say that you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong" (Oscar Wilde)
[30 March - 5 April 2009]

  "Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty" (David Hume)
[6-12 April 2009]

  "Information is only the very first step toward understanding" (Daniel Barenboim, Music quickens time, p. 124)
[13-19 April 2009]

  "But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - Only be sure always to call it 'research' " (Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky)
[20-26 April 2009]

  "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect" (Oscar Wilde)
[27 April - 10 May 2009]

  “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” (Joan McClusky, BMJ, 2009, 338:b1901)
[11-17 May 2009]

  “Teachers cannot help their students understand what they themselves do not understand” (Derek Cheung, J. Chem. Educ., 2009, 86, 514)
[18-24 May 2009]

  “For too many people, life is a compulsory lottery with great advertising but no prices” (Hugh Mann, BMJ, 2009, 338, b1891)
[25 May - 7 June 2009]

  “Although having used it frequently in early publications, the word "important" originates usually from ignorance of the quantitative facts. It contains neither a qualitative nor a quantitative statistical appreciation and might range from significant to negligible” (E. Duursma, Environmental Compartments)
[8-30 June 2009]

  “There's always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe” (J.A. Paulos, Innumeracy. Mathematic illiteracy and its consequences, page 33 on my Penguin 1990 edition)
[1-15 July 2009]

  "On the average day the average person feels a little bit worse than average” (Anonymous, New Scientist 22 Dec.1990)
[16-28 July 2009]

  "Ich habe nichts dagegen wenn Sie langsam denken, Herr Doktor, aber ich have etwas dagegen wenn Sie rascher publizieren als denken” (Attributed to Wolfgang Pauli)
[29 July - 9 August 2009]

  "L'home s'aferra a les creences d'una manera gairebé parasitària" * (Jordi Sabater Pi)
[10-20 August 2009]

  "minds self-exiled from the region of evidence" (Harriet Martineau’s, Life in the Sick Room)
[21 August - 3 September 2009]

  "A mind's strength is measured by the degree of uncertainty it can tolerate" (Friedrich Nietzsche)
[4-20 September 2009]

  "If you can't stand the microwaves, keep out of the kitchen" (G.M. Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975)
[21 September - 4 October 2009]

  "Life is a terminal condition" (M. Bowker, BMJ 2009 339:b3682)
[5-11 October 2009]

  "A thing or idea seems meaningful only when we have several different ways to represent it –different perspectives and different associations" (M. Minsky, Computer Music Journal, Fall 1981, Vol. 5, Number 3 http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/MusicMindMeaning.html)
[12-31 October 2009]

  "It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make observations, and the observations themselves suggest the laws. But it does not work that way. It takes much more imagination than that" (R.P. Feynman, The Meaning of it All)
[1-20 November 2009]

  "Il y a deux sortes de gens, ceux qui veulent être quelqu'un et ceux qui veulent faire quelque chose. J'ai choisi d'appartenir à la seconde catégorie. Il y a moins de compétence." (Attributed to Jean Monnet who, apparently, took it from Dwight Morrow: "There are two types of men, those who want to be somebody and those who want to do something". It is suspiciously similar to "There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there", attributed to Indira Gandhi)
[21-27 November 2009]

  "What I tell you three times is true" (Lewis Carroll)
[28 November - 17 December 2009]

  "Post hoc rationalisations of practices seem, by definition, logical and sensible—using partial bits of knowledge to mask, often from the protagonists themselves, the fact that an a priori decision was based not on facts but on values" (S. Cohn, Where have all the hospital flowers gone? BMJ 2009;339:b5406)
[18-31 December 2009]