Linux Science

How many weeks are there in a light year?

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere
else.
                -- R. Buckminster Fuller

Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.

I am not an Economist.  I am an honest man!
                -- Paul McCracken

I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.
                -- Albert Einstein, on the randomness of quantum mechanics

I do hate sums.  There is no greater mistake than to call arithmetic an
exact science.  There are permutations and aberrations discernible to minds
entirely noble like mine; subtle variations which ordinary accountants fail
to discover; hidden laws of number which it requires a mind like mine to
perceive.  For instance, if you add a sum from the bottom up, and then again
from the top down, the result is always different.
                -- Mrs. La Touche

I do not remember ever having seen a sustained argument by an author which,
starting from philosophical premises likely to meet with general acceptance,
reached the conclusion that a praiseworthy ordering of one's life is to
devote it to research in mathematics.
                -- Sir Edmund Whittaker, "Scientific American", Vol. 183

"I don't think so," said Ren'e Descartes.  Just then, he vanished.

I had a feeling once about mathematics -- that I saw it all.  Depth beyond
depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw -- as one might
see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- a quantity passing
through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus.  I saw exactly
why it happened and why tergiversation was inevitable -- but it was after
dinner and I let it go.
                -- Winston Churchill

I have a theory that it's impossible to prove anything, but I can't prove it.