Science and improv by Uri Alon | Theatre Lab by Uri Alon | What is a chlorine bond? | Chicken | Chalk | A mathematical model for the dynamics and synchronization of cows | The fastest check-out lane at the grocery store? by Mona Chalabi | Caramelization by Science Geist | Does your mind jump around? by Yasmin Anwar | Bad Lip Reading by MCB Follies | Berkeley commencement speech by Sheryl Sandberg | When science was groovy by W. Patrick McCray and David Kaiser | Science is a liar… sometimes by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia | I don’t believe in science by Nate Bargatze | How the giant tortoise got its name by QI | History of the entire world, I guess by Bill Wurtz | Archaeological replication of knives | Captain Math | The Universe by Tim and Eric | Our Fascinating Planet by Demetri Martin | Expert wasted entire life studying anteaters by The Onion | Nerds | Really incorrect Jeopardy! answers | Science doesn’t know everything by Dara O’Briain | Two-Headed Chemistry Expert | Mentoring undergraduates is very important by Heather Forsythe | Learning to say ‘yes, and’ by Ellen K. W. Brennan | Tenure Announcement by James Mickens | Minecraft Institvte of Technology by MITGameLab | Probability Words by Casper Albers | Sean Eddy Sued | The Placebo Effect by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia | Queer Theory for Lichens by David Griffiths | True Facts about the CuttleFish | Bacteria synthesize nano-sized compasses | The Cube Rule by André Arko | Why Do We Dream? by David Eagleman and Don Vaughn | Fourth-down analysis met with skepticism by Greg Garber | When Theory Meets Chalk, Dust Flies by Dennis Overbye | Biscuit Dunking- The Scientific Method by BBC | Diversity and complexity of arthropod references in haiku
“We can only deduce that concentrated bullshit makes scientists look harder for facts.”
(from The Bugle Podcast, episode 150)
“Gamow had a passion for practical jokes- including the rarity, the scientific joke. He wrote his most important paper on the Big Bang in 1948 with Ralph Alpher, a research student. Then Gamow asked an old friend, the physicist Hans Bethe, to allow his name to be added to the list of authors- solely for the fun of being able to cite it as Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, as it is indeed known to this day. By luck, it was published on April 1… ‘You never met him? Crick asked. ‘Oh, I see. Well he was extremely jovial; used to drink a bit too much- by the time I knew him, anyway; and was fond of card tricks… He had a marvelous card trick; one of the best amateur card tricks I’ve ever seen was done by Gamow!’ Crick laughed. ‘And he was what is called good company, was Gamow. I wouldn’t say quite a buffoon, but yes, a bit of that, in the nicest way possible. You always knew, if you were going to spend the evening with Gamow you would have a jolly time. You know. And yet there was something behind it all.’”
[…] “François Jacob once described the next encounter. He found Lwoff in his laboratory, eating his lunch with his secretary and his lab technician. ‘I told him of my wishes, my ignorance, my eagerness. He fixed me for a long time with his large blue eyes, tossed his head, and said to me, ‘Impossible; I haven’t got the least space.’’ Jacob kept coming back- three or four times by Lwoff’s memory, seven or eight in Monod’s account. Each time he got the same blue-eyed look, the same shrug, the same refusal. He tried for a last time in June 1950. The eyes were bluer than usual. ‘Without giving me time to explain anew my wishes, my ignorance, my eagerness, he announced, ‘You know, we have discovered the induction of the prophage!’ I said, ‘Oh!’ putting into it all the admiration I could and thinking to myself, ‘What the devil is a prophage?’… Then he asked, ‘Would it interest you to work on phage?’ I stammered out that that was exactly what I had hoped. ‘Good; come along on the first of September.’’ Jacob went down the stairs, out the street, into the first bookstore to find a dictionary.”
(from The Eight Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson)
“Then there are the times when Levine sets other people on fire. Literally. ‘The most famous thing I ever did is I torched one of my postdocs,’ says Levine. Corbo was there at the time. ‘Mike got a squirt bottle of ethanol, unbeknownst to this hapless postdoc who was sitting at his bench minding his own business,’ says Corbo. Levine shot a ring of ethanol around the young man’s seat and trailed a wick into the hallway. Then he lit it. ‘So this tongue of flame snaked into the lab and encircled this postdoc,’ says Corbo.
‘My technique was a little off and I put a little too much ethanol around his bench. So it’s true, he was temporarily enveloped in a curtain of fire,’ says Levine. ‘But the fire receded and he was ok.’
‘People heard I did this because the guy wasn’t making any data,’ he adds. ‘That’s not true. It was just a joke.'”
(from Fire Fly by Karen Hopkin)
“Vernon Ingram and I spent some time trying to look at lysozyme, from different fowls to see if we could find difference that we could then find down in the amino-acid sequence… We were using just a crude screening. We looked at duck lysozyme, pheasant lysozyme, guinea fowl- and we could easily pick up the differences between these. And I used to go into the lab every morning and weep- the lab assistant would produce an onion, and I would look at that, and I would think sad thoughts, because that helps, and we would take some tears- and it was easy to show that human lysozyme was different from chick lysozyme. But we never found a difference between two hens. […] We can easily pick up the differences between lysozymes of chick and human tears… It is all rather discouraging. Even if we find a difference we shall still have to show it is due to amino acid composition, and also do the generics (which may mean doing tears of cocks!)”
(Francis Crick)
“So it’s not all those other terrible drivers holding things up. It’s everyone’s inability to hold a steady speed and following distance … Removing just a few cars from a road has a disproportionate impact on congestion. Experts would call this traffic being ‘non-linear’. What they mean is that the relationship between cars and delay is not one-to-one. If you remove just 1 percent of commuters off the rush-hour road in especially high-traffic corridors, as some work has shown, you can reduce travel times by 18%.“
(from Traffic Myths by Eric Jaffe)
“I rather suspect that my visual analyses are better indices of the amount of amylose present than the chemical analyses.”
(Barbara McClintock)
“It is important to express oneself very briefly because biologists are wont to read long papers very superficially. Therefore they can never comprehend a new subtle thought correctly, and they must always force it into the ready-made scheme of their concepts.”
(Max Delbrück to Niels Bohr)
“For a British physicist the Cavendish had a unique glamour. It had been named after the eighteenth-century physicist Henry Cavendish, a recluse and an experimenter of genius. The first professor had been the Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, of Maxwell’s equations. While the laboratory was being built he did experiments in his kitchen at home, his wife raising the room temperature for him by boiling pans of water.”
[…] “Sir Lawrence Bragg was one of those scientists with a boyish enthusiasm for research, which he never lost. He was also a keen gardener. When he moved in 1954 from his large house and garden in West Road, Cambridge, to London, to head the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, he lived in the official apartment at the top of the building. Missing his garden, he arranged that for one afternoon each week he would hire himself out as a gardener to an unknown lady living in The Boltons, a select inner-London suburb. He respectfully tipped his hat to her and told her his name was Willie. For several months all went well till one day a visitor, glancing out of the window, said to her hostess, ‘My dear, what is Sir Lawrence Bragg doing in your garden?’ I can think of few other scientists of his distinction who would do something like this.”
[…] “In parenthesis let me say that the English school of molecular biologists, when they needed a word for a new concept, usually use a common English word such as ‘nonsense’ or ‘overlapping,’ whereas the Paris school like to coin one with classical roots, such as ‘capsomere’ or ‘allosteric.’ Ex-physicists, such as Seymour Benzer, enjoyed inventing new words ending in ‘-on,’ such as ‘mutton,’ ‘recon,’ and ‘cistron.’ These new words often obtained rapid currency. I was once persuaded by the molecular biologist François Jacob to give a talk to the physiology club in Paris. It was then the rule that all such talks had to be given in French. As I hardly speak French I did not warm to this suggestion at all, but François pointed out to Odile (who is bilingual in French and English) that if I gave the talk she also could have a trip to Paris, so my opposition was soon worn down. I decided to talk on the problem of the genetic code, thinking, quite incorrectly, that I could do most of it by simply writing on the blackboard. It soon became clear that I would have to speak some French in order to get the idea across, so I started by dictating the whole talk to a secretary (normally I speak from notes). I then deleted all the jokes, since even when giving a talk to a secretary I found that my ad lib jokes intruded, and I felt I could hardly read them out in cold blood. Odile then translated the talk into French, and a typed version of her manuscript was produced, with various stress marks added to make it easier to read. There was a problem, however, about the translation of ‘overlapping.’ What could be the French for that? Odile eventually remembered a suitable word, and we set off for Paris. I was sufficiently mistrustful of this strange word that on arrival I asked François what word they used for ‘overlapping.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘we simply say ‘oh-ver-lap-pang.’”
(from What Mad Pursuit by Francis Crick)
“At this point, I wish I could persuade you that the direction in which this helical drive will move is not obvious. Put yourself back in that swimming pool under molasses and move around very, very slowly. Your intuitions about pushing water backwards are irrelevant. That’s not what counts. Now, unfortunately, it turns out that the thing does move the way your naive, untutored, and actually incorrect argument would indicate, but that’s just a pedagogical misfortune we are always running into.”
(from Life at Low Reynolds Number by Edward Mills Purcell)
“It’s always very risky to gamble against nature. Nature has a very perverse sense of humor.”
(Mike Muller)
“If the eternal dance of molecules
Is too entangled for us mortal fools
To follow, on what grounds should we complain?
Who promised us that Nature’s arcane rules
Would make sense to a merely human brain?”
(Peter Shor)
“Think of all the men who never know the answers
think of all those who never even cared.
Still there are some who ask why
who want to know, who dare to try.”
(from Here He Comes Again by Rod McKuen)
“I also felt a deep gratitude to Fermi, not unmixed with suspicion that my excursion into physics in Rome had misled him into thinking highly of me. I thought of this again one evening some twenty-five years later, when Fermi was already dead and I was back at Columbia Medical School to give a dinner speech to the graduating class. I wondered whether or not I had let him down, whether he would be pleased with me or think me a shallow man who went around giving after-dinner speeches. As I was so musing and looking down along the Hudson River in the golden twilight, suddenly before my eyes the lights of the city failed: the great blackout of 1965. It seemed a rather exaggerated response to my questioning.”
[…] “Traditional wisdom among bacteriologists in those days had it that bacteria had no chromosomes and no genes. This idea was bolstered by the authoritative opinion of an eminent British physical chemist, Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, who through mathematical models explained all hereditary changes in bacteria as due solely to altered chemical equilibria. I have often noticed in later years that biologists are readily intimidated by a bit of mathematics laid before them by chemists or physicists. It was one of the blessings of my too short stay among physicists to be immunized against mathematical hambug.”
[…] “I have respected an admired those colleagues whose scientific work seems to fill their life and pervade every minute of their wakeful time—perhaps their dreams as well. In an extreme form this concentration on science makes one expect a similar concentration in others. An anecdote is told about the great German mathematician David Hilbert, who one day seeing a young colleague in tears (his wife had left him) put his arms around the young man’s shoulders and said comfortingly: ‘Es wird convergieren, es wird convergieren!’ (It will converge.) What else could make a mathematician cry than an integral that refused to converge?”
(from A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube by Salvador Luria)
“Shannon proposed an idea that even he admitted sounded ‘grandiose and utterly impractical–the ideal dream of a mathematician.’ His solution was to create a fourth dimension, one that reversed perceptions of right and left:
‘How will we do this? In a word, with mirrors. If you hold your right hand in front of a mirror, the image appears as a left hand. If you view it in a second mirror, after two reflections it appears now as a right hand, and after three reflections again as a left hand, and so on. Our general plan is to encompass our American driver with mirror systems which reflect his view of England an odd number of times. Thus he sees the world about him not as it is but as it would be after 180 degrees fourth-dimensional rotation.’
Finally, a series of adjustments to the steering system would translate the American driver’s motions into British English: turning the wheel left would make the car go right, and vice versa, et voilà.
Complete with drawings, figures, and schematics, the paper was, of course, written with tongue firmly in cheek. But it remains the most memorable record of Shannon’s time at Oxford. At more than 2,100 words, it was not simply a throwaway idea–it shows Shannon’s willingness to spend hours fleshing out the implications of a joke, as well as his imperturbable indifference to the honors that came his way.”
(from A Mind at Play by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
“He took measurements of the density of the bacteria at different points in time and plotted their growth on little squares of blue graph paper. The experiments were tedious and repetitive, and the bacteria did not always cooperate. On one page of his notebook, after observing that his cultures contained giant clumps rather than a fine slurry of bacteria, Monod scrawled, ’Nécessité absolue trouver origine de cet emmerdement.’ [Absolute necessity to find the origin of this pain in the ass.]”
(from Brave Genius by Sean B. Carroll)
“We believe that the concept of a ‘microorganism’ is more than anything a legacy of the (relatively recent) invention of the microscope – conveniently yet arbitrarily based on human visual acuity rather than on any other value of general biological significance.”
(from The end of microbiology by Roberto Kolter and Scott Chimileski)
“In science one tries to tell people, in such as way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”
(Paul Dirac)