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Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine Unweave a…
Some physiologists will have it that the stomach is a mill; others, that it is a fermenting vat; others, again that it is a stew-pan; but in my view of the matter, it is neither a mill, a fermenting vat nor a stew-pan, but a stomach gentlemen, a stomach.
Science is simply the classification of the common knowledge of the common people. It is bringing together the things we all know and putting them together so we can use them. This is creation and finds its analogy in Nature, where the elements are combined in certain ways to give us fruits or flowers or grain.
If the finding of Coines, Medals, Urnes, and other Monuments of famous Persons, or Towns, or Utensils, be admitted for unquestionable Proofs, that such Persons or things have, in former Times, had a being, certainly those Petrifactions may be allowed to be of equal Validity and Evidence, that there have been formerly…
Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap. For example she could not produce a horse if it were not preceded by all the other animals on which she ascends to the horse's structure as if on the rungs of a ladder. Thus every one thing exists for the sake of all things…
A man in twenty-four hours converts as much as seven ounces of carbon into carbonic acid; a milch cow will convert seventy ounces, and a horse seventy-nine ounces, solely by the act of respiration. That is, the horse in twenty-four hours burns seventy-nine ounces of charcoal, or carbon, in his organs of respiration to…
One hundred million years ago, an ammonoid lived in the sea that then separated India from Asia. It died and fell into limy sediments on the seafloor. These sediments grew deeper and hardened into rock. The shell calcified, becoming part of the rock, though maintaining every detail of its structure. India was on the…
Morris is fond of citing figures that indicate that about five million metric tonnes of cosmic dust falls on the earth each year. He calculates that over five billion years, we should have accumulated a layer of dust 55 m (182 feet) thick! But if you do the calculation correctly (which Morris does not), it amounts to…
When Sabrina was little, she had a vivid imagination, like most children. (She still does!) We all had a lot of fun pretending, playing games with imaginary creatures and friends. That is a healthy part of learning and growing. Rather than tell Sabrina that the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus were lies, we told her that…
Let us suppose that we have laid on the table... [a] piece of glass... and let us homologize this glass to a whole order of plants or birds. Let us hit this glass a blow in such a manner as but to crack it up. The sectors circumscribed by cracks following the first blow may here be understood to represent families…
Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments…
One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of…
If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 191/2 per cent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a per cent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic…
The way Watson plays the game also requires massive amounts of pattern matching. The supercomputer has been loaded with hundreds of millions of unconnected digital documents, including encyclopedias and other reference works, newspaper stories, and the Bible. When it receives a question, it immediately goes to work to…
An interesting reference to the exponential growth when the Vizicar asked the king for doubling growth of grains for each square of the chessboard he had invented. Not terribly large amounts at first, but they become vast as we work across the boards 64 squares.
Ingredients: molasses from the United States anise from Spain licorice from France vanilla (bourbon) from Madagascar cinnamon from Sri Lanka cloves from Indonesia wintergreen from China pimento berry oil from Jamaica balsam oil from Peru And that’s just for a bottle of peacetime root beer.
At the very beginning of the twentieth century competent scientific and lay opinion held that airplanes were impossible. The end of the century, barring the dark specter of nuclear or ecological catastrophes, will probably see joint Soviet and American manned space expeditions to the nearer planets. This is the…
Briefly, a radioactive isotope is a kind of atom which decays into a different kind of atom: for example. one called uranium-238 turns into one called lead-206. Because we know how long this takes to happen, we can think of the isotope as a radioactive clock. Radioactive clocks are rather like the water clocks and…
Langmuir is the most convincing lecturer that I have ever heard. I have heard him talk to an audience of chemists when I knew they did not understand more than one-third of what he was saying; but they thought they did. It's very easy to be swept off one's feet by Langmuir. You remember in [Kipling's novel] Kim that…
But there is another alchemy, operative and practical, which teaches how to make the noble metals and colours and many other things better and more abundantly by art than they are made in nature. And science of this kind is greater than all those preceding because it produces greater utilities. For not only can it…