Quotes About Observation

So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.

That's like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren't slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they're so damned clever.

Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might have put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.)

You're the first person I've seen here who's actually dressed like a monk." "It's a bathrobe.

Is that my foot? Silly me, it's a starfish

Vede insieme l'uno e l'altro polo, Le stelle vaghe e lor viaggio torto; E vedi, 'I veder nostro quanto e corto. (You see both poles at once, the travelling stars in their winding courses, and you see just how limited our seeing really is.)

Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many. The intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.

You can tell that hold is effective because his face is red and the rest of his body is the color of a bottle of 2% milk.

On the flip side is Woody Allen's nebbish observation: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." Companion words include mischief and bonchief, a bad result and a good result, respectively

A secret lab is considered by many to be the physical manifestation of a spark's mind. Thus they tend to be rather individualistic. Some are spotlessly clean; some are filled with dangerous trash. Some are ruthlessly efficient; some are filled with suicidal deathtraps. Needless to say, sparks are usually vocally dismissive of the labs of others, while surreptitiously making notes about things they'd wished they'd thought of themselves.

But, she silently vowed, science demands there be more evaluation of this kissing phenomena.

The wavefunction tells us where we might potentially find an electron when we look; but what we do find in any given experiment is random, and we can't meaningfully say why we find it here rather than there.

We know that measurements of a quantum system seem to collapse the wavefunction. We most certainly don't know how, or why, or indeed if that actually happens.

T]he probabilistic nature of the Schrödinger equation, which predicts only the likelihood of different experimental outcomes, leaves it offering no reason why one specific outcome is observed instead of another. In effect, it says that quantum events (the radioactive decay of an atom, say) happen for no reason.

You've learned by now to wait without waiting; as if it were dusk look into light falling: in deep relief things even out. Be careless of nothing. See what you see. from "How to See Deer

I had only one hard-and-fast rule: avoid interstates. They are predictable and boring, and their uniformity somehow erases changes in landscape; you can drive six hundred miles, from forests into desert, and feel that you haven't gone anywhere. In a sense, you haven't. You have no idea about the lives of the people in the towns and cities you've bypassed at seventy miles an hour. *

Mercedes was not a strong woman. Her bones and limbs seemed too fragile, as if they could break easily if she were pushed or fell. It had taken her months to recover from each birth. She was an extremely sensitive woman, and the brutalities she had observed in life had given her a seriousness beyond her years. She put her faith in God and believed Satan was always there, tempting people with all things bad. One always had to be vigilant against the forces of evil.

People not used to the world … are unskillful enough to show what they have sense enough not to tell.

Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.

The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.11

What people didn't grasp is that the only alternative to a controlled experiment that delivers real insight is an uncontrolled experiment that produces merely the illusion of insight. Cochrane

Einstein himself is reported to have said: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.

the Chicago Symphony was in a class by itself. Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny—you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing. But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy.

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough.