All About Science
A student recognizes Einstein in a train and asks:
Excuse me, professor, but does New York stop by this train?
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Newton sat in an orchard, and an apple, plumping down on his head,
started a train of thought which opened the heavens to us. Had it been
in California, the size of the apples there would have saved him the
trouble of much thinking thereafter, perhaps, opening the heavens to
him, and not to us. [clipped from "TheCourier-Journal," Louisville, KY]
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The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary
telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it
meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
- Albert Einstein
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Here are some more Einstein quotes:
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1) When asked how World War III would be fought, Einstein replied that
he didn't know. But he knew how World War IV would be fought: With
sticks and stones!
2) "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an
hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a
minute. THAT'S relativity."
3) Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
4) If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber.
Einstein, Albert (1879-1955) *
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
_Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium_ (1941) ch. 13
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Dear Dr. Science
Why is the speed of light only 186,000 miles per second? Can't
science do better than this?
"Yes, you're right. It's a disgrace light only goes a measly
186,000 miles per second, but physicists are working on this problem.
There's already a prototype vehicle that goes 200,000 miles per second,
but the headlights shine at only 186,000 miles per second. This is
equivalent to driving down the freeway the wrong way with the
headlights not only out but actually chasing you down the road. This is
why so many scientists today no longer own a driver's licence. "
Remember, Dr. Science knows more than you do! ==============
The great logician Bertrand Russell (or was it A.N. Whitehead?) once
claimed that he could prove anything if given that 1+1=1. So one day,
some smarty-pants asked him, "Ok. Prove that
you're the Pope."
He thought for a while and proclaimed, "I am one. The Pope is one.
Therefore, the Pope and I are one."
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John von Neumann (1903-1957) [Hungarian/US mathematician and scientist]
The following problem can be solved either the easy way or the hard way.
Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is
going at a speed of 50 miles per hour. A fly starting on the front of
one of them flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per hour.
It does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death. What
is the total distance the fly has flown?
The fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it
gets crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil and
paper by summing an infinite series of distances. The easy way is as
follows: Since the trains are 200 miles apart and each train is going
50 miles an hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide. Therefore
the fly was flying for two hours. Since the fly was flying at a rate of 75 miles
per hour, the fly must have flown 150 miles. That's all there is to it.
When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately
replied, "150 miles."
"It is very strange," said the poser, "but nearly everyone tries to sum
the
infinite series."
"What do you mean, strange?" asked Von Neumann. "That's how I did
it!" ==============
Von Neumann and Norbert Weiner were both the subject of many dotty
professor stories. Von Neumann supposedly had the habit of simply
writing answers to homework assignments on the board (the method of
solution being, of course, obvious) when he was asked how to solve problems. One time
one of his students tried to get more helpful information by asking if
there was another way to solve the problem. Von Neumann looked blank for a
moment, thought, and then answered, "Yes".
Weiner was in fact very absent minded. The following story is told
about him: When they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing
that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT
while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would
forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address
on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of
the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a
piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over,
decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper
away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of
course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had
no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address
was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl
on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had
moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've
just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl
replied, "Yes daddy, mommy thought you would forget."
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The french scientist Ampere was on his way to an important meeting at
the Academy in Paris. In the carriage he got a brilliant idea which he
immediately wrote down ... on the wand of the carriage: dH=ipdl/r^2. As
he arrived he payed the driver and ran into the building to tell
everyone. Then he found out his notes were on the carriage and he had to hunt through
the streets of Paris to find his notes on wheels.
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During a class of calculus my lecturer suddenly checked himself and
stared intently at the table in front of him for a while. Then he
looked up at us and explained that he thought he had brought six piles
of papers with him, but "no matter how he counted" there was only five
on the table. Then he became silent for a while again and then told
the following story:
"When I was young in Poland I met the great mathematician Waclaw
Sierpinski. He was old already then and rather absent-minded. Once he
had to move to a new place for some reason. His wife didn't trust
him very much, so when they stood down on the street with all their
things,
she said:
- Now, you stand here and watch our ten trunks, while I go and get a
taxi.
She left and left him there, eyes somewhat glazed and humming
absently. Some minutes later she returned, presumably having called for
a taxi.
Says
Mr. Sierpinski (possibly with a glint in his eye):
- I thought you said there were ten trunks, but I've only counted to
nine.
- No, they're TEN!
- No, count them: 0, 1, 2, ..."
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While Boltzman gave a lecture on ideal gases, he casually mentioned
complicated calculations, which didn't give him any trouble. His
students could not follow the fast mathematics and asked him to do the
calculations on the blackboard. Boltzman apologized and promised to do
better next time.
The next lesson he began: "Gentlemen, if we combine Boyle's law with
Charles's law we get the equation pv= p\sub 0 v\sub 0 (1 + a t). Now it
is clear that \sub a S \sup b = f(x) dx x (a), then is pv=RT and \sub V
S f(x,y,z) dV = 0. It is so simple as one and one is two. At this moment
he remembered his promise and dutyfully wrote 1 + 1 = 2. Then he
continued with the complicated calculations from his bare mind. ==============
Einstein's driver used to sit at the back of the hall during each of
his lectures, and after a period of time, remarked to AE that he could
probably give the lecture himself, haveing heard it several times. So at the
next stop on the tour, AE & the driver switched places, with AE sitting
at the back, in driver's uniform. The driver gave the lecture, flawlessly. At
the end, a member of the audience asked a detailed question about some
of the subject matter, upon which the lecturer replied, 'well, the
answer to that question is quite simple, I bet that my driver, sitting
up at the back,
there, could answer it...'.