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Everyday science

Everyday science

Who said that?

05 Jun 2002

Why find the words to say something yourself when someone else has already expressed it more eloquently? Peter Rodgers explains what he likes and dislikes about quotations.

Highly quotable

Physicists love quotations. How often have you read that “God does not play dice with the universe,” or that “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it,”? When physicists write or say “as Newton/Einstein/Bohr/Feynman once said…”, it immediately gives them authority by closely identifying them with one of the giants of physics – or so they think. “A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought,” as Lord Peter Wimsey says in one of Dorothy L Sayers’ stories.

Wimsey’s comment is particularly true when researchers quote what Michael Faraday is supposed to have said to senior politicians of the day. The story goes that Faraday had just explained some of his findings in electricity and magnetism to either the prime minister or the chancellor. However, the politician was unimpressed and asked the 19th-century experimentalist “What good is it?” or “What use is it?” Faraday is supposed to have replied, “What good is a new-born baby?” or “Why sir, there is the probability that you will soon he able to tax it.”

Now Faraday was a brilliant scientist who, it would seem, had a way with words and whose work certainly had an immense and lasting impact on the way we live. The same cannot be said for all of those scientists who glibly quote Faraday because they simply do not know or do not care how their research might be relevant to anyone, let alone relevant to society, industry and anything else.

By the way, the quotations about babies and taxes that are attributed to Faraday are almost certainly apocryphal because they are not mentioned in any accounts by Faraday or his contemporaries. That is the trouble with a lot of quotations – like the words “Play it again Sam,” in Casablanca, no-one ever said them.

Knowing the literature

Of course, some people are not content with quoting physicists, they want to quote writers and politicians as well – just like I did at the end of the first paragraph of this article. Indeed, if you can work some Shakespeare or poetry into an article, you are no longer just a physicist of distinction, you are also extremely knowledgeable about the arts.

A classic example of being widely read is displayed in Methods of Mathematical Physics by Harold and Bertha Jeffreys. Each of the 25 chapters in this classic monograph begins with a carefully chosen epigraph taken from a great work of literature. Henrik Ibsen, for example, supplies the epigraph for the chapter on contour integration – “Go round about, Peer Gynt.”

A more recent example of this is the intriguingly titled Vacuum Bazookas, Electric Rainbow Jelly and 27 Other Saturday Science Projects by Neil Downie (2002 Princeton University Press), which includes epigraphs from J R R Tolkien, William Blake, Ian Fleming, Edgar Allen Poe and many others.

Another fine example of epigraphy can be found in the late Walter Welford’s book Optics: six of the nine chapters start with short quotations from Ulysses by James Joyce. “Glass flashing. That is how that wise man what’s his name with the burning glass. Then the heather goes on fire,” is the typically Joycean passage that appears at the start of the chapter on laser light.

Indeed, Joyce’s opaque prose has had a major impact on physics, with the word “quark” coming from Finnegans Wake. As Murray Gell-Mann – who received the 1969 Nobel prize for the theoretical discovery of quarks and their interactions – explains in The Quark and the Jaguar, he had decided how the word “quark” would sound before he knew how to spell it. Then, on one of his “occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake“, he came across the phrase “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

Actually, it gets rather complicated because the sound that Gell-Mann had in mind was “kwork”, whereas Joyce clearly meant quark to rhyme with Mark. (See Gell-Mann’s book for more details. Note also the absence of the apostrophe in Finnegans Wake – this is a true sign of someone who knows his Joyce.)

Of course, it is not all one-way traffic from literature to physics. The very best novelists and playwrights have used ideas from modern physics in their work. Martin Amis regularly relies on physics imagery in his fiction – in London Fields shirts are “electromagnetic” and the world is “crazy like an X-ray laser”.

And the American writer John Updike captures the very essence of neutrinos in just a few lines in his poem Cosmic Gall:

Neutrinos, they are very small.
  They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
  To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
  Or photons though a sheet of glass.
  They snub the most exquisite gas

In his book, Gell-Mann suggests that “do not” should be changed to “scarcely” in the third line, but again that is another story.

You can quote me on that

But how do quotations – especially those by famous physicists – get into circulation? There are several excellent books of scientific quotations, such as Physically Speaking – which was compiled by Carl Gaither and Alma Cavazos-Gaither (1997 Institute of Physics Publishing) – and The Expanded Quotable Einstein, edited by Alice Calaprice (2000 Princeton University Press). And Web sites such as www.bartleby.com/quotations and www.quotationspage.com are useful when you are looking for a quotation to serve a very precise purpose – like the quotation about quotations I quoted earlier. But that does not explain how clever things said by physicists today will be repeated by the physicists of tomorrow.

I must confess a selfish interest here. I have made several unsuccessful attempts to get the phrase “Richard Feynman is the Jimi Hendrix of physics,” into general use. The first time I did this – in an article about the number of books Feynman had “published” after he died (see Physics World October 1998 p3) – I carefully explained the analogy: “Feynman is fast becoming the Jimi Hendrix of physics. Both were great showmen and revolutionaries who continue to exert enormous influence. And just as Hendrix has ‘released’ dozens of albums since he died, compared with just four when he was alive, Feynman seems to be doing the same.” I promise that this is the last time I will inflict the phrase “Richard Feynman is the Jimi Hendrix of physics,” on anyone – but please feel free to use it yourself.

Luckily I am not alone in being ignored. I have always felt it a great shame that the verb “to Hubble” – meaning to screw up in a major unfocused way (Physics World December 1994 p41, print version only) – did not enter common usage. Similarly Robert Park’s description of repeated reports of new data supporting cold fusion as the physics equivalent of “Elvis sightings” (www.aps.org/WN/WN90/wn060890.html) was just too good to be ignored. But it was.

So what recent quotations have entered general use? Well I have a theory about this. To gain widespread acceptance a quotation must involve God or have been said by Stephen Hawking. Think of the most widely quoted sayings that have originated over the past 15 years: Hawking saying that each equation in his book would halve sales; Hawking talking about “knowing the mind of God” at the end of A Brief History of Time; Leon Lederman calling the Higgs boson the “God particle”; and George Smoot saying that measuring fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation was like “seeing the face of God”.

As always, sex makes good copy, and again Hawking is the modern master. “There’s nothing like the eureka moment of discovering something that no-one knew before,” he said earlier this year. “I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.”

And what about love? Well physicist love quotations – you can quote me on that, I read it somewhere.

Quotations quiz

(a) “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.” Which Shakespeare play does this line come from, and for which popular physics book did it provide the title?

(b) “If he was around now, I’d love to buy him a beer…but I don’t know if I’d introduce him to my sister.” Who is being described here?

(c) Who said: “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”?

(d) Who said: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”?

(e) Which theoretical physicist – once described as “a slender blend of Father Christmas, God and a member of The Grateful Dead” – coined the phrase “the theory of everything”?

Answers

Buy the books
Physically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations on Physics and Astronomy by Carl Gaither and Alma Cavazos-Gaither: IOP bookmarkphysics
The Expanded Quotable Einstein, ed Alice Calaprice: Amazon UK/Amazon US

Answers
(a) This quotation from Hamlet provides the title for The Universe In A Nutshell by Stephen Hawking. (b) Albert Einstein as described by Dennis Overbye of the New York Times in a talk entitled “Sex and Physics” (
www.edge.org/3rd_culture/overbye/overbye_print.html). (c) Steven Weinberg in The First Three Minutes. (d) Weinberg in The First Three Minutes again. (e) John Ellis of CERN.

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