On Naming the Quark

In 1963, when I assigned the name 'quark' to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been 'kwork.' Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word 'quark' in the phrase 'Three quarks for Muster Mark.' Since 'quark' (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with 'Mark,' as well as 'bark' and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it...

 The Fictitious Orion Society

I learnt very quickly that the only reason that would be accepted for not attending a committee meeting was that one already had a previous commitment to attend a meeting of another organization on the same day. I therefore invented a society, the Orion Society, a highly secret and very exclusive society that spawned a multitude of committees, sub-committees, working parties, evaluation groups and so on that, regrettably, had a prior claim on my attention. Soon people wanted to know more abou...

 An 11th Century View of Science

The chief aids to philosophical inquiry and the practice of virtue are reading, learning, meditation, and assiduous application. Reading scrutinizes the written subject matter immediately before it. Learning likewise generally studies what is written, but also sometimes moves on to what is preserved in the archives of the memory and is not in the writing, or to those things that become evident when one understands the given subject. Meditation, however, reaches out farther to what is unknown,...

 The Golden Mean is the Secret

The golden mean is the secret of tolerance, of modesty, of a healthy skepticism-of knowing that every dogmatic definition of God is a pale intimation of the truth and, inevitably it seems, an excuse for jihad, pogrom, or crusade.

 Spinoza's Reasoning was Childish

There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it all deep and profound. My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza--and there was teh most childish reasoning! There were all these Attributes, and Substances, all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now, how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch phiosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there was no excuse for it! In that same period there was Newton...