Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow

volatile green lion in the central salt of Venus and distill. This spirit is the green lion the blood of the green lion Venus, the Babylonian Dragon that kills everything with its poison, but conquered by being assuaged by the Doves of Diana, it is the Bond of Mercury.

Instead, like Heisenberg, his priority seemed to be to preserve as much of German science as possible, while complying with all Nazi laws and regulations.

Today we know that there are other solar systems only tens of light years away. Had the Golden Age continued unabated, we might by now have sent probes exploring them. We might have landed on the moon in the year 969 instead of 1969. We might have an understanding of space and life that is unimaginable to us today. Instead, events occurred that would delay the progress begun by the Greeks by a millennium.

One end of the spectrum of fantastical thinking is labeled "crackpot," and the other "visionary.

With regard to both the physical and the social world, one of the main lessons of neuroscience is that our perception of reality is something we actively construct, not a passive documentation of objective events.

Research suggests that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.

One morning during Lent in 415, Hypatia climbed into her chariot, some say outside her residence, some say on a street intending to ride home. Several hundred of Cyril's stooges, Christian monks from a desert monastery, swooped upon her, beat her, and dragged her to a church. Inside the church they stripped her naked and peeled away her flesh with either sharpened tiles or broken bits of pottery.

What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the questions behind the five geometric revolutions of world history. It started with a little scheme hatched by Pythagoras: to employ mathematics as the abstract system of rules that can model the physical universe.

I saw two rare beetles & seized one in each hand; then I saw a third & new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.

It all began when the Beagle's previous captain, Pringle Stokes, shot himself in the head and, after the bullet didn't kill him, died of gangrene.

along with our responses to them, determine

Pythagoras was a charismatic figure and a genius, but he was also a good self-promoter. In Egypt, he not only learned Egyptian geometry but became the first Greek to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics, and eventually became an Egyptian priest, or the equivalent, initiated into their sacred rites. This gave him access to all their mysteries, even to the secret rooms in their temples.

Today we call our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, or "Wise, Wise Man.

Your own species ends up with a name like that when you get to choose it

regulations allow for up to ten insect fragments per thirty-one-gram serving.

Meanwhile, a serving of broccoli may contain sixty aphids and/or mites

while a jar of ground cinnamon may contain four hundred insect fragments.

in 1904 he applied for a promotion from patent clerk third class to patent clerk second class and was turned down.

The reason is, when there is a hard problem, one has to work a long time and has to be persistent. In order to be persistent, you have got to be convinced that it's worthwhile working so hard, that you're going to get somewhere.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die

The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome;

Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different.    ââ'¬â€JAMES BORG I

claiming publicly that comets follow natural law and not God's whim was a gutsy thing to do, especially given that the prior year—almost fifty years after Galileo's condemnation—the professor of mathematics at the University of Basel, Peter Megerlin, had been roundly attacked by theologians for accepting the Copernican system and had been banned from teaching it at the university.

Yes, as distasteful as it is, it is beneficial to talk to people who disagree with us. So if you hate conspiracy theories and run into someone who believes that we faked the moonlanding and Einstein plagiarized relativity from his mailman, don't tell him, 'You life is a cruel joke' and walk away. Have tea with him. It can broaden your style of thinking, and it's cheaper than seeing a therapist.