Notes

Quotes I liked

“The terms used by the anonymous referee were so harsh that the only logical alternative to suicide was to give up science forever.”

Clifford Truesdell

“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

Jorge Luis Borges

“Doesn’t all science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the evanescence of its object in its very apprehension, and by the pitiless reversal that the dead object exerts on it? It is science that masters the objects, but it is the objects that invest it with depth, according to an unconscious reversion, which only gives a dead and circular response to a dead and circular interrogation.”

Jean Baudrillard

“Thus “physics”, by definition, is become exclusively the study of the structure of matter, while anyone who considers physical phenomena on a supermolecular scale is kicked aside as not being a “real” physicist. Often “real” physicists let it be known that all gross phenomena easily could be described and predicted perfectly well by structural theories; that, aside from the lack of “fundamental” (i.e. structural) interest in all things concerning ordinary materials such as water, air, and wood, the blocks to a truly “physical” (i.e. structural) treatment are “only mathematical”.”

Clifford Truesdell

“It is not hard to talk people into believing they cannot possibly live without something that a few years earlier they had not the slightest idea existed. In fact the West’s entire economy rests on this principle.… Some day this diabolical circle must be broken, or mankind will perish.”

Erwin Chargaff