Academics From The United States

"Poincaré was an artist par excellence. Estheticism with him was not a mere creed: it was a way of life."

"The evolution of scientific thought is inseparable from the history of man's efforts to resolve the perplexities of his own existence."

"His essays on the foundations of science are cases in point. They strike one as extemporaneous speeches rather than edited articles. ...those who knew him best insisted that he rarely, if ever, would revise a manuscript, even if he was fully aware of its stylistic shortcomings."

"d'Alembert, who wrote the introduction to the Encyclopédie, resigned his editorship with the scathing remark that the work was like a harlequin's coat: some good stuff, but mostly rags."

"Barely a hundred and fifty years had passed since Galileo's experiment at Pisa had ushered in the new order of things; a mere instant as compared with the previous life of the race. Yet, this brief span had witnessed a complete shift in the outlook of the intellectual leaders of humanity: from blind adherence to authority and dogma towards a healthy habit of facing facts and an enlightened faith in the efficacy of reason. Few doubted that this buoyancy and self-reliance of the leaders would eventually reach the masses, thus causing a profound metamorphosis in the attitude of the common man towards his own life and the destinies of his race. ...Led by thinkers, and under the banners of liberty, happiness, and truth, humanity was to emerge into a Golden Age, free from oppression and strife. Alas! The French Revolution... resembled more a convention of inquisitors and hangmen than it did an assembly of enlightened emancipators. ...After twenty years of adventure, the humanitarian aspirations bequeathed by the Encyclopedists, tattered and trampled first by a bloody republic, then by a still bloodier empire, were finally declared dead by the Holy Alliance."

"One part of the dreams of the eighteenth century intellectuals was realized: the resources of nature did yield a magnificent harvest. But the thinkers who helped to tap these resources... failed to attend, detained in their studies and laboratories, lost in their dreams and calculations, seeking new fields, co-ordinating old and new, spinning abstract theories... the thinkers were unequal to the task of developing these vast resources, most of which they had themselves uncovered. The shrewd declassés, who had... the world to gain, pioneered this development and took possession of the earth."

"The mathematical activity of Ancient Greece reached its peak during the glorious era of Euclid, Eratosthenes, Archimedes and Apollonius, a time when Greek letters, art and philosophy were already on the decline. ...it was not Greece proper but its outposts in Asia Minor, in Lower Italy, in Africa that had contributed most to the development of mathematics."

"Mathematics fluourished as long as freedom of thought prevailed; it decayed when creative joy gave way to blind faith and fanatical frenzy."

"Despite the vociferous claims of the Platonists and Neoplatonists, Plato was not a mathematician. To Plato and his followers mathematics was largely a means to an end... they viewed the technical aspects of mathematics as a mere device for sharpening one's wits, or at most a course of training peparatory to handling the larger issues of philosophy. This is reflected in the very name "mathematics,"... a course of studies or... a curriculum. ...in the Dialogues... such topics as harmony, triangular numbers, figurate numbers... which we view today as more or less irrelevant, if not trivial, were taken up at length. ...the guiding motive behind the... Pythagoreans and Platonists was... metaphysical ...which for the nonprofessional have all the earmarks of the occult. ...We also discover in the Pythagorean speculations more than a mere germ of... the scientific attitude."

"It has the very commendable aim of contributing towards stressing the cultural side of mathematics. ...there appears the widespread interchange of the definitions of excessive and defective numbers. ...it is stated that Euclid contended that every perfect number is of the form 2n-1(2n -1). It is true that Euclid proved that such numbers are perfect whenever 2n - 1 is a prime number but there seems to be no evidence to support the statement that he contended that no other such numbers exist. ...it is stated that the arithmetization of mathematics began with Weierstrass in the sixties of the last century. The fact that this movement is much older was recently emphasized by H. Wieleitner... it is stated that the arithmos of Diophantus and the res of Fibonacci meant whole numbers, and... we find the statement that in the pre-Vieta period they were committed to natural numbers as the exclusive field for all arithmetic operations. On the contrary, operations with common fractions appear on some of the most ancient mathematical records."

"Sometimes he stood in the center of the quad, looking at the five huge columns in front of Jesse Hall that thrust upward into the night out of the cool grass. ... Grayish silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to him to represent the way of life he had embraced, as a temple represents a god."

"He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned."

"... he could not bring himself to hate the Germans. But the Germans were there to be hated."

"The class had read two plays by Shakespeare and was ending the week with a study of the sonnets. The students were edgy and puzzled, half frightened at the tension growing between themselves and the slouching figure that regarded them from behind the lectern. Sloane had read aloud to them the seventy-third sonnet; his eyes roved about the room and his lips tightened into a humorless smile. ... ... Someone coughed. Sloane turned his dark bright eyes upon Stoner. "Mr. Stoner, what does the sonnet mean?" ... In a moment of silence, someone cleared his throat. Sloane repeated the lines ... Sloane's eyes came back to William Stoner, and he said dryly, "Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner, do you hear him?" ... Stoner's eyes lifted slowly and reluctantly. "It means," he said, and with a small movement raised his hands up toward the air; he felt his eyes glaze over as they sought the figure of Archer Sloane. "It means," he said again, and could not finish what he had begun to say."

"Do not tempt us with the poet's twisted pride. Here is the double fact that we must grasp— The sea is lonely and the land is wide."

"A necessary strategy of literary criticism is to propose problems, and a necessary illusion is that those problems can be solved. But the problems and solutions are more often than not celebrations of the literature they address and gestures that would bring us closer to a past that is forever receding from us. The force of literature is at last magical, and the mysteries that we try to solve are the validations of its power."

"For most of history poetry has been an oral art, it retains the vestiges of orality, an experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds."

"There is no true poetry unconcious inspiration."

"The poet creates it; the people by recitation recreate it. Poet and reader (hearer) are moments of the same reality."

"The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said."

"Poetry is a form of necessary speech."

"Hirsch's poems are compassionate , reverential , sometimes relievingly ruthless."

"Examples of Hirsch poems"

"Extract links Hirsch's 'Poets Glossary'"

"The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is reading and recitation: participation."

"Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I’m speaking or trying to speak"

"The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry..it paces the poem."

"These ruinous days of Autumn.At dusk, the brightness seeps through the crumbling air, at dusk the air gathers up the brightness"

"I was never able to pray but let me inscribe my name in the book of waves."

"Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, words waiting to be vocalized."

"Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution , a perception."

"... the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical , the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over over all possible bubbles in the multiverse, everything that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable."

"String theory suggested that we should have a whole new set of particles called "supersymmetric partners" that were supposed to be observed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN — we don't see those."

"I know of no other scientist, no other theoretical physicist alive who has a clearer focus on whether our theories and ideas are relevant to the real world. And that's always what he's after."

"The Preservationist holds that, to save others from suffering truly serious losses, like the loss of life or limb, often it's wrong to lie, and to cheat, and to steal, even though nobody will ever suffer much from your doing any of that. By contrast, the Liberationist holds that, when necessary to lessen serious suffering, then, provided nobody suffers seriously in consequence of your so doing, it's always morally good to do all those unruly things and more."

"Here, we may well distinguish between Extreme Liberationism and Open Liberationism. So, as regards stealing, for example, the Extreme view holds that ... not only is it good to steal, but it's wrong not to do so. By contrast, Open Liberationism holds that it's at least good to steal and, while it's open to the (epistemic) possibility that it's wrong not to do so, it's also open to the possibility that it's not wrong. While I'm inclined to think that, in the end, even the Extreme view is correct, in this book it's enough to argue for Open Liberationism."

"[O]rdinarily, and in most philosophical works, too, we take it that each individual experience is perfectly private to, or is enjoyed only by, just that very individual [...]. But, for both so many philosophers and so many philosophically innocent thinkers, that may be no more than an enormously widespread and deeply ingrained error. In point of fact, the real situation may be that each of these experientially similar individuals is similarly related to the very same single experience [...] with me and all my overlappers, it really may be that each of us is having—in the way of having quite peculiar to experiences—on and the same individual experience."

"(quote at 33:07 of 49:06)"

"The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design."

"Poetry may be written on paper, but it’s an oral art.A good poem satisfies the ear .It creates a story or picture that grabs you."

"Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse."

"Reading a poem aloud by someone who understands it, can be a crucial experience, but better yet is reading it aloud oneself."

"Reciting a poem aloud, you are not like an actor, rather you come to understand, then to be, the voice of the poem itself."

"The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud."

"Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of enjambment, ..the interplay of line-end and sentence-flow."

"Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind."

"Not being a philosopher I've had to work through my feelings and puzzlements in poems."

"A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is , and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively."

"I revise very little. I always write in long hand and revise when I type. I test them out when I read them aloud."

"Inspiration comes within a framework. A poem that gets out of hand is not a poem."