• Question: What is your favourite science related quote and what does it mean to you?

    Asked by daleh001 to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      You have to be careful quoting quotes as it’s always possible they have become altered with time to not be anything like that originally meant but ….. I read this one in The Independent newspaper one Saturday morning (they used to run a quote of the day) attributed to Ernest Rutherford:

      All Science is physics, anything else is stamp collecting.

      It struck a note with me for several reasons. First, being at that time basd in Manchester, I was aware that Rutherford was probably the most famous scientist to have passed through those corridors. Second, because at that time I was quite excited about just begining to use some mathematics to try and explain some biological experiments phenomena and, as I’ve said in other posts, I hated physics at school – so the notion that my inability with that subject had whatever research I did labelled as stamp collecting made me choke a bit on my corn flakes. Third, I had a chuckle at the quote because in 1908 Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for …………chemistry.
      (and that’s why I’ve always had a sneaky suspicion he might not have said the quote – maybe some of the others can clarify?)

    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      The quote that is at the beginning of my thesis at the moment is

      “I like the universe, but she messes with my words”

      It’s from a song by a band called Motion City Soundtrack and it’s meant to be about a girl but I take it literally! I think the universe is awesome but it’s sometimes hard to write about my research, especially in my thesis which is a really long report that I have to write about all of the work I’ve done as part of my PhD. So the universe is messing with my words by being difficult to write about!

      Like Michael said, it’s hard to know whether someone originally said it! I also like

      “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics”

      which Richard Feynman apparently said!

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