When we (and  I remain a proud chalkie) stand in front of a class, education,  teaching, training, wisdom, knowledge, learning, understanding and  erudition are all parts of what we should be transmitting, along with  culture, enthusiasm and a few other things, but to the simple critics,  teaching is what they did when they taught a younger blood-relative to  ride a bicycle, or to swim, or to drive.

Just that and no more.  There are no nuances, no finesse, no planning --  you just step up to the mark and commence your spiel. No control  problems either, because the young'n has volunteered, is alone, and with  a relative.
Peter Macinnis, 25/8/2005

"All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous." (actually he said it in Latin "Sola dosis facit venenum ", way cooler, this is often rendered as  "It is the dose that makes a poision")
Paracelsus

You mean post-modernism is not to do with renewing the telegraph poles up and down the streets?

Next you'll tell me the deconstructionists are not the people to call when you want a brick wall taken down and that post-impressionists don't stand around, all cylindrical and wooden!
Peter Macinnis, quoted 4/12/2008

Science isn't a collection of "facts". Science is a body of observations bound by theory into a meaningful whole. It is also a collection of methods that allows us to collect useful information about the universe (to collect the observations that will allow us to create meaningful theories). Indeed, one could claim that the methods for testing theories is far more important than the observations and theories themselves (and that the theories should be fruitful, that is they should lead to predictions which will generate previously unknown observations).
Ian Musgrave, quoted 25/11/2008

Definition of a boat : "A hole in the water, entirely surrounded by either timber or fiberglass, into which you chucked Very......Large.......Lumps of money that you Never......Saw......Again."
Nisaba Merrieweather's ex-husband, quoted 16/12/2007

A triviality is a statement whose opposite is false. However, a great truth is a statement whose opposite may well be another great truth.
Niels Bohr

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress!
Niels Bohr

All great truths begin as blasphemies, but all blasphemies do not become great truths.
George Bernard Shaw, Anajanska [1919]

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx

Four stages of acceptance:
i) this is worthless nonsense,
ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view
iii) this is true, but quite unimportant.
iv) I always said so.
John Haldane (1892-1964), English geneticist

and some earlier incarnations:

"Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it."
- Louis Agassiz - Swiss/American geologist/naturalist, (1807-1873)

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer - German philosopher (1788 - 1860)

The only thing dumber than asking dumb questions is asking no questions at all.
Juliette, message to ABC Science Matters 9th October, 2004


Statistics can be tortured to confess to just about anything.
Morris Gray

An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.
Mark Twain - On the Decay of the Art of Lying

There is nothing more disturbing than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept
Ansal Adams

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance.  The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with
the record that is being played at the moment.
George Orwell, preface to Animal Farm (1945)

Hypotheses are discarded daily.
Theories are not.
Models are indeed manufactured - from evidence.
Sometimes more evidence is needed, sometimes gathered evidence fine tunes a theory or occasionaly even changes our understanding. This change in understanding may produce a new theory.
The new theory must account for more than the old one did - it's as simple as that.
Paul Williams

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Albert Einstein

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.
Kahlil Gibran

A mind is a lot like a parachute, to work properly it must first be open.
Anon

In my (rather obscure) opinion mathematics is not a science at all...
It's the hammer, while science is the materials you attempt to construct with it..
Kevin Phyland, message to ABC Science Matters 9th October, 2004

Mathematics is the paintbrush with which beautiful pictures may be painted.  These patterns sometimes resemble the 'real' world in some ways.
Zero Sum, message to ABC Science Matters 9th October, 2004

"It's because their minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, he told himself, that their mouths are allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves."
Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

"The society based on production is only productive, not creative."
Albert Camus, 1913–1960, "Creation and Revolution" part 4, The Rebel (1951, trans. 1953)

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; (I am large--I contain multitudes.)"
Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass"

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me  a sense of obligation."
Stephen Crane from War Is Kind, and other lines (1899)

A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.
 Eleanor Roosevelt

"Even when walking in the company of two other men, I am bound to be able to learn from them. The good points of the one I copy; the bad points of the other I correct in myself."
Confucius

"Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing 'does not!'"
"Dr Pepper" of the STUMPERS-L list on Fidonet

Research : Finding out stuff. Finding out stuff that has never been found out before is the most exciting kind of research. The more stuff you have found out, the more power you have to do good things, and bad things. The country that finds out the most stuff wins. Also, it takes money to find out stuff, especially stuff that has never been found out before.
 Key Centre for Polymer Colloids Website

"The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers."
Lewis Thomas

"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
Lewis Thomas

"Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done."Pathogenicity may be something of a disadvantage for a microbe, carrying lethal risks more frightening to them than to us.  The man who catches a meningococcus is in considerably less danger for his life, even without chemotherapy, than meningococci with the bad luck to catch a man.
Lewis Thomas (1913 -93 ), The Lives of a Cell, Penguin Books, 1978, 77.

Watching television, you'd think we lived at bay, in total jeopardy, surrounded on all sides by human-seeking germs, shielded against infection and death only by a chemical technology that enables us to keep killing them off.
Lewis Thomas, 'Germs' in The Lives of a Cell, Penguin, 1973.

Human nature is indeed a combination of Darwin's universals, Galtons's heredity, James's instincts, De Vries's genes, Pavlov's reflexes, Watson's associations, Kraepelin's history, Freud's formative experience, Boas's culture, Durkheim's division of labour, Piaget's development and Lorenz's imprinting. No account of human nature would be complete without them all
Matt Ridley -Nature Via Nurture

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

It's normal to want to do everything humanly possible to save a life, and that's important.  Doing everything humanely possible to ease suffering is much more important, and sometimes, when the treatment is worse than the disease, and the disease is beyond any chance of a cure, that means letting go.  Knowing when to let go is the most important thing of all.  Give them every good day they have coming, but know when that last good day has been spent.
K. Sacksteder

You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that need altering.
The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
Robert A. Heinlein

"If we want clear and accurate understanding of the world we need to eliminate inconsistent and false beliefs.  Supposing that the earth is flat, or that a pure water diet will cure pneumonia, may have serious practical consequences. Evidence may mislead us seriously, or even fatally: it is usually important to be right"
William Grey, Philosophy and the Paranormal, All us Apes

"A train station is where a train stops, a bus station where a bus stops, and on my desk I have a workstation..."
Professor Philidore, message to ABC Science Matters 16th October

Any containment philosophy is flawed in the sense that what you are trying to contain only has to get lucky once....
Zero Sum, message to ABC Science Matters 15th October, 2003


To say those that think logically neglect the unknown, well this is absurd, as science is, after all, about finding the answer to the unknown and hasn't there been many answers (as well as 42  :-) )
Anne, message to ABC Science Matters 21st September 2003


One should not keep such an open mind that your brain falls out though. And remember to treat snappy quotes very, very carefully.
Ian Musgrave, message to ABC Science Matters 21st September 2003


"...by the same reasoning it is possible that at this very moment a little green man with three heads is sitting on the dark side of the moon, drinking raspberry cordial through one mouth, whistling "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" through another, and swearing in Ancient Sanskrit through the third mouth. It might be unlikely, but it remains a possibility."
Chris Forbes-Ewan, message to ABC Science Matters 18th June 2003

The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.
Freeman Dyson

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.