#inform

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man! ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#deep-thoughts #humor-inspirational #ignorance #ignoring-issues #incapable-of-interpreted

It has been common knowledge to informed collectors that many times the finest and rarest art glass is found unsigned. ↗

— James Lafferty

#been #collectors #common #common knowledge #finest

Despite its enormous power and wealth, China's ruling elite remains absolutely petrified that the free flow of information will undermine its political legitimacy, particularly among China's younger generation. ↗

— Tom Lantos

#among #china #despite #elite #enormous

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. ↗

— Robert Lanza

#any #automatically #brain #computer #consciousness

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely. ↗

— Mary Leakey

#could #freely #gave #information #kinds

Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about. ↗

— Seth Lloyd

#being #certainly #civilization #course #history

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits. ↗

— John Locke

#ask #attribute #been #conversing #descriptions

The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition. ↗

— Simon Wiesenthal

#build #crimes #defence #history #information

The Internet is both great and terrible. As a source of information, a tool for delivering music and art, it's great. But spamming ads and piracy of music is terrible. It's stealing. ↗

— Gary Wright

#art #both #delivering #great #information

The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium. ↗

— Stephen C. Meyer

#dna #id #information #intelligent-design #science