Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow

discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife.

Upon learning of the young man's interest in a physics book, Lindemann, a number theorist, abruptly ended the interview, saying, "In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.

Stephen Hawking once told me that there was a sense in which he was glad to be paralyzed, because it allowed him to focus much more intensely on his work.

Michael Jordan once said, "I've missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I've lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

But if she is allowed to move at constant speed without pausing at Zeno's imaginary checkpoints—and why not?—then the time it takes to travel each of Zeno's intervals is proportional to the distance covered in that interval, and so since the total distance is finite, as is the total time—and fortunately for all of us—motion is possible after all.

Unfortunately, in 1861, when he was forty, Buckle caught typhus while traveling in Damascus. Offered the services of a local physician, he refused because the man was French, and so he died.

Deep within our brains, as in theirs, our shadowy unconscious mind is continuously applying the lessons of our past experience to predict the consequences of our current circumstances. In fact, one way to characterize a brain is as a prediction machine.

Newton was "not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow human beings.

If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, "I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives," you'd probably get a pretty strange look;

theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.

Annoyed that although outlawed in Rome, astrology was nevertheless alive and well, Cicero noted that at Cannae in 216 B.C., Hannibal, leading about 50,000 Carthaginian and allied troops, crushed the much larger Roman army, slaughtering more than 60,000 of its 80,000 soldiers. "Did all the Romans who fell at Cannae have the same horoscope?" Cicero asked. "Yet all had one and the same end.

They required three thousand Jews, the man said, and the line had apparently held 3,004.

the destination was the local cemetery, where everyone was ordered to dig a mass grave and then was shot dead and buried in it.

My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality.

Pauli turned to the audience and argued, "Yes, my theory is crazy enough!" Then Bohr insisted, "No, your theory is not crazy enough!

In 1932, after nineteen years of research, Bartlett published his results.

Heisenberg, who was attempting to hold German physics together, resented Schrödinger's departure, "since he was neither Jewish nor otherwise endangered.

Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.

The Nazis confiscated his personal property, burned his works on relativity, and put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

they left for California, Einstein had told his wife to take a good look at their house. "You will never see it again," he told her.

Not too long ago, the man who was then the president of Iran was quoted as saying that Jews descended from monkeys and pigs.

Born, barred from teaching and worried about the ongoing harassment of his children, also immediately sought to leave Germany.

It is always heartening when a fundamentalist of any religion professes a belief in evolution

1943 Bohr was tipped off by the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen that he faced immediate arrest as part of the plan to deport all of Denmark's Jews.