One Funeral At A Time

Submitted by cvining on

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

[Often paraphrased as "Science progresses one funeral at a time".]

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Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. New York: Philosophical library, 1950, p. 33, 97

An expert cvining

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

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Crazy enough? cvining

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

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Said to Wolfgang Pauli after his presentation of Heisenberg's and Pauli's nonlinear field theory of elementary particles, at Columbia University (1958), as reported by F. J. Dyson in his paper "Innovation in Physics"

Drown in a bathtub cvining

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

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Interview on NPR's Morning Edition, May 25, 2001

Heartless attack

Submitted by cvining on

You have to have a heart to have an attack

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Said of Peter Sellers who suffered 8 heart attacks when he inhaled amyl nitrites (poppers) as a sexual stimulant