American Squirm

HEY ERIK GOODMAN! WHAT DOES ENTOMOLOGIST NANCY HINKLE DO FOR FUN?

Her real pride and joy is on the other counter. That’s where she keeps her 43 colonies of bedbugs....

Every few weeks, Ridge carries the bedbugs out to her red Honda, puts them behind the driver’s seat, and brings them home. There, at six in the morning, she inverts the jars on the skin of her right leg. She positions them just so, leaning them up against her left thigh and covering them with a blanket so they don’t move. Then, as the bugs suck her blood through tiny holes in the bridal veil, she leans back and listens to the radio news of “Democracy Now!”

caramba!

HEY CHARLES DARWIN? WHAT WERE YOUR COLLEGE DAYS LIKE?

No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles.

On day on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.

-CD

HEY FRITZ ZWICKY! HOW COME I DIDN'T SEE YOU AT THE BIG REVIVAL MEETING?

To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle, God, is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker.

-FZ

HEY RICHARD ERNST! HOW COME YOU NEVER GO ROLLER BLADING WITH US ANY MORE?

In recent years, more and more of my time has become absorbed by administrative work for the research council of ETH-Z of which I am presently the president.

-RE

HEY ARTHUR EDDINGTON! HOW DO YOU LIKE MY LATEST THEORY - THE ONE THAT POSITS THAT THE TOTAL ENTROPY OF AN ISOLATED SYSTEM DOESN'T ALWAYS INCREASE OVER TIME?

If your theory is found to be against the second law of theromodynamics, I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

-AE

HEY WERNER HEISENBERG! HOW'D YOU GET TO BE THE WAY YOU ARE?

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

-WH

HEY CAMILLO GOLGI! WHY HAVE YOU BEEN CALLING ME ALL HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT?

Taking advantage of the method, found by me, of the black staining of the elements of the brain, staining obtained by the prolonged immersion of the pieces, previously hardened with potassium or ammonium bichromate, in a 0.50 or 1.0% solution of silver nitrate, I happened to discover some facts concerning the structure of the cerebral gray matter that I believe merit immediate communication.

-CG

HEY JOHANNES STARK! I HAVEN'T SEEN YOU AROUND FOR A WHILE. WHAT'S UP?

For some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connection between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.

-JS

HEY CHARLES DARWIN! WHAT'S THE SCOOP?

 

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

 

-CD

HEY FRITJOF CAPRA! WHAT THE HECK WAS TEKTOLOGY?

 

Tektology was the first attempt in the history of science to arrive at a systematic formulation of the principles of organization operating in living and nonliving systems.

-FC

HEY JACQUES AMAND DESLONGCHAMPS! IS THAT AN EXTINCT CROCODYLIFORM IN YOUR POCKET OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME?

Jacques Amand Eudes-Deslongchamps was a French naturalist and paleontologist. He discovered remains of Teleosaurus in one of the Caen quarries, and he became an ardent paleontologist.

 

ALBERT HOFFMAN

I was aware that LSD, a new active compound with such properties, would have to be of use in pharmacology, in neurology, and especially in psychiatry, and that it would attract the interest of concerned specialists. But at that time I had no inkling that the new substance would also come to be used beyond medical science, as an inebriant in the drug scene. Since my self-experiment had revealed LSD in its terrifying, demonic aspect, the last thing I could have expected was that this substance could ever find application as anything approaching a pleasure drug.

-AH

HEY ALFRED RUSSELL WALLACE! WHAT DID YOU DO OVER WINTER BREAK?

 

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

-ARW

CARL SAGAN - ON LIMITS

 

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

 

-CS

NICOLAUS COPERNICUS

There may be babblers, wholly ignorant of mathematics, who dare to condemn my hypothesis, upon the authority of some part of the Bible twisted to suit their purpose. I value them not, and scorn their unfounded judgment.

-NC

POLYKARP KUSCH

If, on occasion, the knowledge brought by science leads to an unhappy end, this is not to the discredit of science but is rather an indication of an imperfect ability to use wisely the gifts placed within our hands.

-PK

ALFRED NOBEL

I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results.

-AN

JOHN VON NEUMANN

 

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

 

-JVN

RICHARD FEYNMAN

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

-RF

EDWARD FORBES - ON MOLLUSCS

 

I have in hands, now, specimens of bottom from the Gulf Stream, ...  and I can say that they are among the most interesting that I have ever seen.

 

-EF

 

 

BRIAN GREENE

No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

-BG  

WERNER HEISENBERG

 

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

 

-WH

ALEX VILENKIN - ON HOW THE UNIVERSE WILL END

All of a sudden a tiny little bubble will appear. It can appear anywhere—under your chair, or somewhere in Andromeda, very far away—and this little tiny thing starts growing at a speed that’s pretty close to the speed of light. And as it expands, all things that it engulfs turn into an alien form of matter. It may be approaching us right now. Say it nucleated at Andromeda some millions of years ago, it may be expanding toward us at the speed of light. But we don’t get much of a warning. So the good thing about it is you don’t really have to worry about it.

-AV

I don't believe most of what I read on this site anyway.

STEPHEN BABCOCK

Stephen Moulton Babcock was an agricultural chemist. He is best known for his Babcock test in determining dairy butterfat in milk processing.

HANS GEIGER

In 1928, German physicist Hans Geiger co-invented the Geiger Counter, a portable machine that counted (detected) alpha particles.

here

IVAN PAVLOV - ON SALIVA

Edible substances evoke the secretion of thick, concentrated saliva. Why? The answer, obviously, is that this enables the mass of food to pass smoothly through the tube leading from the mouth into the stomach.

-IP

STEPHEN JAY GOULD

With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot. 

-SJG

FREDERICK HOPKINS

Hopkins oversaw a study that proved rats' growth is impeded when fed all the known ingredients of milk -- fats, proteins and carbohydrates -- instead of milk itself.

His work established that unknown trace substances he called "accessory food factors" were present in milk, and his papers on the topic were the first to explain the concept of vitamins.

STANLEY B. PRUSINER

Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1997. His findings have had profound impact on research into diseases now known to be caused by prions, including new variant (nvCJD) and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or "mad cow disease".

LOUIS AGASSIZ

Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.

-LA
 

ODD HASSEL

Odd Hassel won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1967, for his 1950 work laying out the fundamentals of conformational analysis (the study of molecules' three-dimensional geometric structure).

K. ERIC DREXLER

After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.

-KED

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

-RO  

JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.

-JAW

ROBERT BUNSEN

A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all.

-RB

JAMES HANSEN

I tend to be naive and gullible, I guess, but I try to believe that governments believe what they say.

-JH

RICHARD FEYNMAN - ON GIVING UP DRINK

You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It’s the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.

-RF

GEORGE GAMOW

Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star
Biggest puzzle from afar
How unlike the other ones
Brighter than a billion suns
Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star
How I wonder what you are.

-GG

DAVID HAUSSLER

Nature makes monsters. Nature makes threats. Many of the things that are most threatening to us are a product of nature.

-DH

threats

ALAN GUTH

Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.

-AG

MARJORIE COURTENAY-LATIMER

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was the South African museum official who in 1938 brought to the attention of the world the existence of the coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for sixty-five million years.

LUDWIG BOLTZMANN

Philosophy gets on my nerves. If we analyze the ultimate ground of everything, then everything finally falls into nothingness.

-LB

CHARLES DARWIN

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

-CD

LEO SZILARD

I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.

-LS

DIAN FOSSEY - ON VARIOUS APES

The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.

-DF

ALBERT HOFMANN - ON LSD

I suddenly became strangely inebriated. The external world became changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain inrelief; they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing. Even self-perception and the sense of time were changed. When the eyes were closed, colored pictures flashed past in a quickly changing kaleidoscope. After a few hours, the not unpleasant inebriation, which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared. What had caused this condition?

-AH

JOHN LILLY

John Cunningham Lilly (January 6, 1915 – September 30, 2001) was an American physician, neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, psychonaut, and writer.

He was a researcher of the nature of consciousness using mainly isolation tanks, dolphin communication, and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in combination.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.

-JL

ISAAC NEWTON

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. 

-IN

BILL NYE - ON EDUCATION

 

If you look back on all the teachers that you liked, I am sure you will find they were very entertaining.

-BN

AUGUST FERDINAND MOBIUS

August Ferdinand Mobius was a mathematician and theoretical astronomer who is best known for his work in analytic geometry and in topology. In the latter field he is especially remembered as one of the discoverers of the Mobius strip.