Brian Hayes (scientist) Quotes (1949-)

“How can we measure the effects if we can't even count the dead to the nearest million?”

“A big advantage of the serial-number approach to identity is that things stay the same even as they change.”

“I'm not a mathematician, but I've been hanging around with some of them long enough to know how the game is played.”

“Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance.”

“It's all done with gears. Also pinions, snails, arbors; pawls and ratchets; and cam followers; cables, levers, bell cranks, and pivots.”

“I discovered that the computer is not like the violin; it doesn't take inborn genius or a lifetime of practice to get sweet music out of it.”

“If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by the prevention of drowning, and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war.”

“The absence of a golden rule for mattress flipping is a disappointment, but it does not pertend the demise of civilization. We can adapt; we can learn to live with it.”

“The fact that randomness requires a physical rather than a mathematical source is noted by almost everyone who writes on the subject, and yet the oddity of this situation is not much remarked.”

“A retired physicist reading the Encyclopedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace.”

“The integers, the rationals, and the irrationals, taken together, make up the continuum of real numbers. It's called a continuum because the numbers are packed together along the real number line with no empty spaces between them.”

“By the way, the = notation was invented by Robert Recorde (1510-1558). He choose two parallel lines as a symbol of equality " because noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle."”

“In 1948 John Archibald Wheeler, in a telephone conversation with his student Richard Feynman, proposed the delightful hypothesis that there is just one electron in the universe.”

“I am reminded of those prodigies who spent years of their lives calculating digits of the decimal expansion of $pi$ - a task that is now a mere warm-up exercise for computer software. I cannot help wandering which of my labors will appear equally quaint and pathetic to some future reader who ransacks libraries for old volumes like this one.”

“Empires come and go; so do ideologies and even religions, but war marches on through it all.”

“The condensation of all property in the hands of one individual is an economic catastrophe-something like the formation of a black hole in astrophysics. It's obviously bad news for the majority of the people, who are left penniless. But even if you happen to be the big winner, your victory may prove hollow. Although you have all the riches in the world, you can't buy a thing, because no one else has goods to sell.”