Quotes About Interpretation

We have only thermal sensors to guide us, which is why when you sit down on a wet spot, you can't generally tell whether it really is wet or just cold.

Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.

The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English control and French contrôler as synonyms when in fact the English form means "to dominate or hold power" while the French means simply "to inspect." The treaty nearly fell apart as a result. The

The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: 'I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.' 'Don't you think God knows the facts?' Bethe asked. 'Yes,' said Szilard. 'He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.' Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom

color isn't a fixed reality but a perception.

His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. So

Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: 'It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring' (Observer); '… with the economy moving into a negative growth phase' (The Times). Growth obviously indicates expansion. If a thing is shrinking or standing still, growth simply isn't the word for it.

Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well, we've covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.

explanations, like dreams, only make sense while they're happening.

Oh, you can trust the studies well enough, generally speaking. What you can't trust are the sweeping conclusions that people often attach to them.

In breve, e come sempre, in Shakespeare un lettore attento può trovare sostegno per quasi qualsiasi posizione voglia prendere. (O come lo stesso Shakespeare ha scritto in una battuta citata spesso a sproposito: «Il diavolo può citare le Sacre Scritture per i propri fini».)

Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature.

As John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, "It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer." All

As with so much else, you experience the world that your brain allows you to experience.

As Donald Goldsmith notes, when astronomers say that the galaxy M87 is 60 million light years away, what they really mean ('but do not often stress to the general public') is that it is somewhere between 40 million and 90 million light years away - not quite the same thing.

Consider the oft-quoted statement "the exception proves the rule." Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the rule.

polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.

Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying "buyed," "eated," and "goed" because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.

It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one's face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things.

Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?" and others of similarly inventive cast.

When you describe a chili as hot, you are being more literal than you might suppose. Your brain interprets it as being actually burned.

A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

One of the reasons the Mona Lisa looks enigmatic is that she has no eyebrows.