Some random (?) quotes...

This page would be meaningless if the following quotes were indeed purely random. Rather, they reflect my beliefs in some issues of life, to varying extent. That is why they are here.

[Professor] Slater asked, 'Why do you think you should go to graduate school at MIT?'

'Because MIT is the best school for science in the country.'

'You think that?'

'Yeah.'

'That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is.'

-- Richard Phillips Feynman, 'Surely you are joking, Mr Feynman!'

Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious -- whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought -- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

-- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

[I actually do not know if I agree with the following; but it is food for thought.]
The purpose of physics is to produce predictions which fit experiment, and it is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the underlying phenomena should be given.

-- Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1901-1984),
on Quantum Theory

[Same comment for the first one here.]
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

-- Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1978)

Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?

-- Bertrand Russell

But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.

-- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988),
during a TV interview in 1981

God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consiousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.

-- Richard Phillips Feynman,
in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything,
edited by P C W Davies and J Brown

Hedgehog's Dilemma

Ritsuko: He seems to have a personality unsuited to making friends, doesn't he? Do you know the story of the "Hedgehogs' dilemma"?
Misato: Hedgehogs? The thorny ones?
Ritsuko: If a hedgehog wants to give his warmth to other hedgehogs, the closer he approaches, the more they injure each other. It's the same with some people. Because he is frightened by the aches in his heart, he now seems so cowardly.
Misato: He will realize in time that in growing up, people learn to get a sense of distance for each other's hurt feelings.

-- Neon Genesis Evangelion Episode 3

(Ritsuko: Akagi Ritsuko; Misato: Katsuragi Misato)
People make a mistake who think my art has come easily to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not studied over and over.

-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

-- Sir Isaac Newton, 1727

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

-- Richard Phillips Feynman, (Rogers Commission Report) Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle, reprinted in 'What do you care what other people think?'

Friends of the Road

Why do friendships come and go? How does a once-bosom pal wind up erased from your address book? Is a friendship that fades away necessarily a bad thing?

My first inkling that some friendships are meant to be fleeting came in my senior year in university. Friendships there had been especially intense. We'd bonded instantly and tightly, with meandering all-hours conversations about everything from the meaning of life to "What will we wear tonight?" Once I came across a line that seemed to express my 21-year-old angst. It was from James Michener's novel Centennial: 'God, he wished he could ride forever with these men ... but it could not be. Trails end, and companies of men fall apart.'

Of course! Some friendships are meant to be transitory. Like cowboys who had ridden herd together for vast distances, sharing dusty perils and round-the-campfire coffee, my university friends and I had come to the natural end of our path together. It was time to move on. Absurdly obvious, the idea was nevertheless enormously comforting. It had once seemed like a failure to me, to build a friendship only to have it squelched by sudden distance, either physical or emotional. You move across the country and struggle to replicate daily long walks with phone calls or letters. Or one of you has a baby, and the minutiae of changing nappies transforms the built-for-two bicycle into a lop-sided three-legged stool.

And that's OK. Because in addition to our friends of the heart -- the traditional, everlasting ideal -- life is rich with friends of the road who, like Michener's cowpokes, herd with you for a particular stretch and no farther. These brief friendships are equally intense, equally necessary, equally worth treasuring as any other, and for the duration of the ride, you can't survive without them.

-- Paula Spencer in Aspire, and Reader's Digest 1997 January p 122

[Jacky has a Chinese translation of this passage on his web page, which he thinks, has a better choice of words. Please do compare them if you can read Chinese.]