Quotes from Steven Vogel

I'm not even much of a gardener—my contribution to the family garden consists mainly of compost.

Except for a human-powered hoist described

Perhaps science was a retarded child because its parent was philosophy rather than engineering, because, we might say, it put Aristotle above Archimedes.

Recognize, though, that graphs and equations provide an economical and effective way of expressing things that torture the tongue.

The search for predictive and explanatory general rules—that's the crux of our game.

science isn't about the things but about the relationships among the things.

Reductionism describes the scheme, and it has a long history of successes.

This book intends to make the case for explanation by reduction to physics and mechanical engineering, to this alternative realm of explanation: not to alternative explanations but to explanations of phenomena with which the biologist's classical chemical reductionism just doesn't help. As we'll see, this realm not only explains different phenomena but provides information that makes wonderfully satisfying intuitive sense.

Electrons and photons are still worse. In graduate school I roomed for a time with a particle physicist. He ended one attempt to explain the essence of an exciting lecture by admitting, with uncommon candor, that he could think of no explanation, not even an analogy, that wasn't unacceptably misleading.

the majority of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve these problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it.

did of controlled burnings by the native population before the arrival of the first British explorers.29 And the history of that native population is itself long and complex, so one would be hard-pressed to specify the moment at which the forests were "first" touched by humans.

Nothing taxes a bird's muscles as much as flying,