“If you were to throw 10 billion photons at a polarizing filter, and the average probability of each one going through is, say, 3/4, you would expect 3/4 of 10 billion would get through. Likewise, the energy that they would carry would be 3/4 of the energy that you attempted to put through. Classical theory says nothing about the statistics of the thing—it simply says that the energy that comes through will be precisely 3/4 of the energy which you were sending in. That is, of course, impossible if there is only one photon. There is no such thing as 3/4 of a photon. It is either all there, or it isn’t there at all. Quantum mechanics tells us it is all there 3/4 of the time.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III
Author: Tetman Callis
“Quantum mechanics is a different kind of a theory to represent the world. . . . Nature knows the quantum mechanics, and the classical mechanics is only an approximation; so there is no mystery in the fact that in classical mechanics there is some shadow of quantum mechanical laws—which are truly the ones underneath. To reconstruct the original object from the shadow is not possible in any direct way, but the shadow does help you to remember what the object looks like. . . . We must always go back to the real world and discover the correct quantum mechanical equations. When they come out looking like something in classical physics, we are in luck.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III
“If you think technology is going to solve your problems, you don’t understand technology, and you don’t understand your problems.” – Laurie Anderson (interviewed by Anderson Cooper)
“We speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx—or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it—and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongues around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, and sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a string of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.” – Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
“Remember that the city is a funny place, something like a circus or a sewer. And different people, they’ve got peculiar tastes. And the glory of love just might see you through.” – Lou Reed, “Coney Island Baby”
“The old cavalry units had been converted variously into infantry or artillery or armor or reconnaissance units, plus one vestigial type that lingered briefly; this was a ‘horse-portee’ unit, in which the horses were bodily transported in motor vans for the long road hauls and then unloaded for use in local reconnaissance. This device, totally abandoned in February of 1942 as fantastic, was the last effective struggle made by the American cavalryman in behalf of his horse’s place in the overseas combat forces. For decades the mounted service had been the mainstay of frontier fighting and the school in which some of the Army’s most distinguished and aggressive field commanders both in World War I and World War II had received their tactical training; the horse cavalry now was finished as a major arm.” – Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, Vol. 1-1, United States Army in World War II
“An army is an army. It is not a political group. It is not a citizens’ meeting.” – General George C. Marshall (in testimony before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, 77th Congress, 1st session)
“Even when I have it I don’t have it.” – Lou Reed, “Temporary Thing,” Take No Prisoners
“The irreducible constitutional minimum of standing under Article III consists of three elements. First, the plaintiff must have suffered an injury in fact, an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent, rather than conjectural or hypothetical. Second, there must be a causal connection between the injury and the challenged action of the defendant. Third, it must be likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that the injury would be redressed by a favorable decision.” – Judge Hamilton, United States of America v. Funds in the Amount of $239,400, et al. (Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, July 28, 2015)(internal cites and quotations omitted)
“The trouble with quantum mechanics is not only in solving the equations but in understanding what the solutions mean.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III
“ ‘It is well settled that a party named in a contract may, by his acts and conduct, indicate his assent to its terms and become bound by its provisions even though he has not signed it.’ ” – Justice Pucinski, Illinois Appellate Court, First District, Fourth Division, November 1, 2012, Asset Recovery Contracting, LLC v. Walsh Construction Co. of Illinois
“A vagrant is anybody a cop don’t like.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“Beside an irrigation ditch a preacher labored and the people cried. And the preacher paced like a tiger, whipping the people with his voice, and they groveled and whined on the ground. He calculated them, gauged them, played on them, and when they were all squirming on the ground he stooped down and of his great strength he picked each one up in his arms and shouted, Take ‘em, Christ! and threw each one in the water. And when they were all in, waist deep in the water, and looking with frightened eyes at the master, he knelt down on the bank and he prayed for them; and he prayed that all men and women might grovel and whine on the ground. Men and women, dripping, clothes sticking tight, watched; then gurgling and sloshing in their shoes they walked back to the camp, to the tents, and they talked softly in wonder: We been saved, they said. We’re washed white as snow. We won’t never sin again. And the children, frightened and wet, whispered together: We been saved. We won’t sin no more.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“It’s all downhill after the first kiss.” – Lou Reed, “Modern Dance”
“You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late.” – John Williams, Butcher’s Crossing
“The great highways streamed with moving people. There in the Middle and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands. They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their sense were still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life. And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them—hostility that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people. In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property, Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“Our awareness of continuity is rooted in the constantly recurring awareness of loss, past, present, and to come, and upon grief, the seismic emotional response to being deprived of those we love, and of all that seems indispensable to us.” – W.S. Merwin, “You Can Take It With You”
“The lessons of war are painfully learned, yet with war over are quickly forgotten until it is time to begin learning them again by the same painful process as before. They can at least be chronicled by the historian, to facilitate the relearning.” – Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, Vol. 1-1, United States Army in World War II
“One of the largest difficulties in adjusting a peace-minded people to the temporary pursuit of war is that the facts of war are often in total opposition to the facts of peace. An industrialist trained in economy will employ for a given job just enough means to perform the job. He will avoid all excessive use of manpower and material alike. Nothing could be more rational than this instinctive economy of force. But war is irrational and war is waste, fundamentally; likewise its processes are appallingly wasteful of the less important—and sometimes wisely so, the peacetime economist is astonished to learn. Unlike the industrialist just mentioned, the efficient commander does not seek to use just enough means, but an excess of means. A military force that is just strong enough to take a position will suffer heavy casualties in doing so; a force vastly superior to the enemy’s will do the job without serious loss of men and (often more important still) with no loss of the all-important commodity, time; it can thereafter plunge straight ahead to the next task, catching the enemy unaware and thus gaming victory after victory and driving a bewildered enemy into panic.” – Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, Vol. 1-1, United States Army in World War II
“A democracy is not ruled by warriors, even in wartime, but by civilian authority.” – Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, Vol. 1-1, United States Army in World War II
“Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template . . . a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a morass of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war. . . . The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness . . . . The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian,
and other nonmilitary measures—applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population. All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special-operations forces. The open use of forces—often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation—is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict.” – Mark Galeotti, “The ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and Russian Non-Linear War”
“If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a noise? A real tree falling in a real forest makes a sound, of course, even if nobody is there. Even if no one is present to hear it, there are other traces left. The sound will shake some leaves, and if we were careful enough we might find somewhere that some thorn had rubbed against a leaf and made a tiny scratch that could not be explained unless we assumed the leaf were vibrating. So in a certain sense we would have to admit that there is a sound made. We might ask: was there a sensation of sound? No, sensations have to do, presumably, with consciousness. And whether ants are conscious and whether there were ants in the forest, or whether the tree was conscious, we do not know.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III (emphases in original)
“Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, ‘The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants— insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it.” – John Steinbeck (interviewed by Herbert Sturz)
“Intellectual theories to the contrary, criticism remains a subjective act, a kind of fiction passing for objective discourse.” – Robert Demott, “Introduction,” Penguin Classics Edition of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
“The natural writer would almost always rather be reading, writing, or alone, except of course when he needs something from one of the three basic food groups: sex, love, and attention. He may be a selfish son of a bitch, he may seem to care more about his work than about the people in his life, he may be a social misfit, a freak, or a smooth operator, but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood. Indeed, the great paradox of the writer’s life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.” – Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
“To say that attending graduate school is the end of innocence is not an exaggeration.” – Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
“Europe isn’t a continent, unless the word is defined Eurocentrically. Europe is a peninsula; the division between Europe and Asia is arbitrary, unlike the divisions between other continents.” – James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
“Sociologists have long agreed that schools are important socializing agents in our society. ‘Socializing’ in this context does not mean hobnobbing around a punch bowl but refers to the process of learning and internalizing the basic social rules—language, norms, etiquette—necessary for an individual to function in society. Socialization is not primarily cognitive. We are not persuaded rationally not to pee in the living room, we are required not to. We then internalize and obey this rule even when no authority figure lurks to enforce it. Teachers may try to convince themselves that education’s main function is to promote inquiry, not iconography, but in fact the socialization function of schooling remains dominant at least through high school and hardly disappears in college. Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to conform.” – James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (emphasis in original)