Talk-Polywell.org

Lately i feel some great people are speaking to us. We just have to listen




I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
- Freeman Dyson


I don't mind occasionally having to reinvent a wheel; I don't even mind using someone's reinvented wheel occasionally. But it helps a lot if it is symmetric, contains no fewer than ten sides, and has the axle centered. I do tire of trapezoidal wheels with offset axles.
- Joseph Newcomer


You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works - it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.
- Freeman_Dyson


Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
- Nikola Tesla


I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success ... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
- Nicola Tesla


"...Machiavelli noted that '..there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things...'
At videodisc, I believe these words had special significance..."
- Dr. Jay J. Brandinger, Vice President, RCA SelectaVision Videodisc Operations, June 27, 1986.


When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.
- Lord Kelvin


The one thing I remember is that Ehrenfest said to me: "Well, that is a nice idea, though it may be wrong. But you don't yet have a reputation, so you have nothing to lose".


History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
- Mark Twain

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison


Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.
- Aristotle


There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
- Aristotle


That's the nature of research-you don't know what in hell you're doing.
- "Doc" Edgerton


Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
- John von Neumann



But the ultimate shape owes its genesis partly to an element of chance which in principle cannot be analysed further.
- Werner_Heisenberg


An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.
- Werner_Heisenberg


It’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Sooner or later everything turns to shit.
- Woody Allen


Genius sees the answer before the question.
- Robert_Oppenheimer



The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
- Oscar Wilde 1854-1900


Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de St. Exupery



A paradox is not a conflict within reality. It is a conflict between
reality and your feeling of what reality should be like.
- Richard Feynman


Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.
- Edwin Howard Armstrong



If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.
-Enrico Fermi





And finally my contribution to it all

The key word here is interpret, because, for the time being, the aim is not to find a unique rendering of an existing musical composition for which the author did not foresee a version expressed by light.
The day when a composer will compose music using notes that remain to be determined in terms of music and light, the interpreter's liberty will be curtailed, and that day, the artistic unity we were talking about will probably be closer to perfection...
-Vladimir Baranoff Rossiné




A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times, may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes of nature.
- Nicola -Tesla




Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
- Leonardo da Vinci




No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.
- Edward Teller





I didn't think; I experimented.
-Wilhelm Roentgen




History proves abundantly that pure science, undertaken without regard to applications to human needs, is usually ultimately of direct benefit to mankind.
- Irving Langmuir





This coupling together of science with international peace, is, I think, particularly significant.
- Irving Langmuir




When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.
- Edward Teller




I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so. - Edwin Armstrong




We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations
- Charles Swindoll




Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe




Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people
-David Sarnoff




Let us not paralyze our capacity for good by brooding of man's capacity for evil
- David Sarnoff

How about "The optimist sees the light at the end of a long dark tunnel that doesn't really exist, and the pessimist is always blowing out nonexisting lights."

"If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking." --George S. Patton

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we do know that just ain't so." - Artemus Ward

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962

“Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and ‘fascist,’ while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.” Jean-François Revel

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning. Source: The Book of Lies

Change is hard. The universe is full of inertia. And people who are either stupid or not interested. Sometimes both. Unrelenting effort is required. - Simon

“Physicists dream of Nobel prizes, engineers dream of mishaps.” Hendrik Tennekes http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/03/ ... -tennekes/

"You cannot be sure you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do." Milton Friedman

Some people get all their pleasures from negative emotions. - Ouspensky

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
Sir Winston Churchill

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
-- Thomas Jefferson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Thomas Jefferson

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness. -- Marcus Aurelius

[L]ook at the characters of your own associates. Even the most agreeable of them are difficult to put up with; and for that matter, it is difficult enough to put up with one's own self. -- Marcus Aurelius

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius

luck is when opportunity meets preparedness.


All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

A wise man can learn from a fool, but a fool cannot learn from a wise man.


There's one about you only progress from making mistakes, but I cannot remember it fully, so these will have to do for now;

http://www.quotegarden.com/mistakes.html