Memorable quotes
Follow the noise. […] the source of the noise turned out to be most interesting and unexpected. In the research that forms the basis of chaos theory, it is often the exploration of variability and apparent noise — random-appearing signals from physical and physiological systems — that has been the starting point for progress.
Mark Shelhamer
You can’t even begin to understand biology, you can’t understand life, unless you understand what it’s all there for, how it arose — and that means evolution.
Richard Dawkins
[A living organism] … feeds upon negative entropy … Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.
Erwin Schrödinger
Nature never undertakes any change unless her interests are served by an increase in entropy.
Max Planck
Now entropy is a measure of how many ways I can rearrange those grains and still keep the sand pile the same […] Entropy always increases… because it’s overwhelmingly more likely that it will.
Brian Cox
The most impressive fact is that gravity is simple. It is simple to state the principles completely and not have left any vagueness for anybody to change the ideas of the law. It is simple, and therefore it is beautiful. It is simple in its pattern. I do not mean it is simple in its action—the motions of the various planets and the perturbations of one on the other can be quite complicated to work out, and to follow how all those stars in a globular cluster move is quite beyond our ability. It is complicated in its actions, but the basic pattern or the system beneath the whole thing is simple. This is common to all our laws; they all turn out to be simple things, although complex in their actual actions.
Richard P. Feynman
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Stephen Hawking
Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.
Paul Dirac
Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
Richard P. Feynman