Harvard University Alumni

"Dinosaurs have a bad public image as symbols of obsolescence and hulking in­ inefficiency; in political cartoons they are know-nothing conservatives that plod through miasmic swamps to inevitable extinction."

"I do not be­lieve birds deserve to be put in a taxo­nomic class separate from dinosaurs."

"The classical view of dinosaurs presents a perplexing problem. The group of vertebrates which dominated the land before the rise of the dinosaurs were the synapsids, the mammal-like reptiles... Most paleontologists have believed that the locomotion and physiology of these mammal-like synapsids were more similar to those of active, warm-blooded mammals than to sluggish modern lizards or alligators. Surprisingly, though, when the first dinosaurs and their near relatives appeared in the Triassic period, the synapsids began to decline and soon became extinct. The dinosaurs then ruled the land unchallenged for over 100 million years while the early mammals, the surviving descendants of the synapsids, remained very small in size and number. Only after the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared about 70 million years ago did the mammals develop into the great variety of dominant land vertebrates we have today. The problem is this: if the later synapsids were such splendidly advanced animals with the improved physiology of mammals, and if dinosaurs were slow and sluggish, why were the mammal-like synapsids exterminated in competition with the first dinosaurs? And why didn't the mammals achieve a more significant diversification during the dinosaurs' reign?"

"The dinosaurs are not extinct. The colorful and successful diversity of the living birds is a continuing expression of basic dinosaur biology."

"Giant predator lizards can't evolve in the presence of big mammal predators. So the lesson is that mammals suppress much of the evolutionary potential of modern lizards. Is the Komodo dragon a good working model of how dinosaurs succeeded? Absolutely not. Dinosaurs suppressed the evolutionary potential of mammals, not the other way around. And dinosaurs carried out this supression everywhere, on all the continents, not merely on a few tiny tropical isles. Dinosaurs succeeded where Komodo dragons fail."

"The dinosaur is for most people the epitome of extinctness, the proto­type of an animal so maladapted to a changing environment that it dies out, leaving fossils but no descendants."

"Most experts have assumed that the allosaurs, about 35 feet long, were the worst threats to the herbivores of the Jurassic, some of which were gigantic and probably able to fend off even an allosaur. But epanterias would have spelled trouble for everyone."

"Even 'Jurassic Park III' tried to jump on the avian-dino bandwagon by making a brave attempt to adorn Velociraptor with a feathery hair-piece. (The result looked like a roadrunner's toupee- don't blame the effects-artists; it's notoriously difficult to render feathers in computer graphics animation, so we'll have to wait for 'JP IV' for a more thoroughly rendered avian pelage.)"

"The rex bite is unique among better known dinosaurs. Instead of inflicting a long, shallow wound, rex jaws would thrust a few crowns deep into bone armor, killing a Triceratops with a single blow. We see close-linked co-evolution here, a terminal Cretaceous arms race. Triceratops is the commonest horned dino of the time, the final dinosaurian Age, the Lancian. T’tops departs from the ceratopsian tradition of frill construction. Torosaurus, very rare during the Lancian Age of the Cretaceous, retains that basic design: the frill is composed of thin bone rods that make a frame, with huge holes in the middle. Triceratops fills in the holes with greatly thickened bone. Why would Triceratops invest in five times as much bone volume in its frill? Well…to me the answer is obvious. Because the commonest predator has evolved great, armor-penetrating teeth. The argument goes in the other direction – T. rex evolved swollen, tall tooth crowns to deal with the unusual protection of the commonest horned herbivore."

"Ceratosaurus is and has been my favorite dino since 1958. This is a minority taste. I’ve met only one dino-digger who rated it #1 in desirability."

"The message from the tropics is unambiguous: To be a successful big land animal, you must cope with mammals, and to cope with mammals you must be a mammal yourself, or at least have metabolism as high as a mammal's. And big mammals have suppressed big reptiles in our tropics for the last sixty-five million years. So how can the dinosaurs' success over mammals' be explained? By assuming that dinosaurs had low-energy metabolic styles? Not very likely."

"The master class, which transforms everything and everyone into its instruments, imposes its views and values upon the wage slaves, who come to see the world through the eyes of their oppressors."

"The next possessors of nuclear weapons may be Iran, North Korea, or possibly some terrorist bodies. Is there any hope that they will have absorbed the nearly universal inhibition against the use of nuclear weapons, or will at least be inhibited by the recognition that the taboo enjoys widespread acclaim?"

"There is a distinction between an individual life and a statistical life. Let a 6-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks."

"The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger."

"Arms control is so often identified with limitations on the possession or deployment of weapons that it is often overlooked that this reciprocated investment in non-nuclear capability was a remarkable instance of unacknowledged but reciprocated arms control."

"The essence of these tactics is some voluntary but irreversible sacrifice of freedom of choice. They rest on the paradox that the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself; that, in bargaining, weakness is often strength, freedom may be freedom to capitulate, and to burn bridges behind one may suffice to undo an opponent."

"What this book is about is a kind of analysis that is characteristic of a large part of the social sciences, especially the more theoretical part. That kind of analysis explores the relation between the behavior of individuals who compromise some social aggregate, and the characteristics of the aggregate.These situations, in which people's behavior or people's choices depend on the behavior or choices of other people, are the ones that usually don't permit any simple summation or extrapolation of the aggregates. To make that connection we usually have to look at the system of interaction between individuals and their environment, that is, between individuals and other individuals or between individuals and the collectivity."

"By "market" is meant the entire complex of institutions within which people buy and sell and hire and are hired and borrow and lend and trade and contract and shop around to find bargains."

"That means that in the course of twenty years, Americans in the strategic nuclear business have gone from considering the no city strategy a preposterous one to one that is so obvious that it's taken for granted that the Soviets reciprocate the general idea. Whether this is based on any knowledge that the Soviets actually do, I don't know. My own feeling is that this is an idea that made much more sense to the Soviets than to the Americans. I think the Americans typically have rather formal, grand and honorable ideas about warfare and I think Soviet leaders are much more aware of the role of violence, brutality, ugly diplomacy, both in their internal politics and in dealing with other nations, and I don't think they have nearly as much traditional baggage about the way to use military force in war and I think if they saw that it suited their purpose to treat American cities as hostages in order to keep us from attacking their homeland populations, it might appeal to them much more quickly than it would appeal to a typical American."

"In the mean time, synthetic organic methodology has experienced an explosive expansion, which is due to two fundamentally different types of developments: (i) theclassical reactionshave been modified to become regio-, diastereo-, and enantioselective, and to become catalytic (cf. organocatalysis). (ii) The—mostly catalytic—use of transition-metal derivatives has enriched organic synthesis withnew types of reactions(cf. metathesis), which can almost all be rendered enantioselective by employing chiral ligands on the metal centers. Many of the resulting procedures for carrying out certain transformations have turned out to be of broad scope and to be generally reliable, so that—for brevity—they were named after their inventor(s) in synthetic discussions, and that’s all about Name Reactions. It is, therefore, not surprising that several monographs on this subject have appeared and that new editions of books on Name Reactions are essential. (...) Name Reactions are at the core of the art of organic synthesis!"

"As one moves out to sea, the world's dimensions change. While things on land grow distant, the sea increases in its expanse, made bluer and wilder; there is a taste of something grand in it. It makes one seem small but also connected to larger forces, part of a great planetary flow. I felt deeply inside the present moment, as if I'd entered a more authentic state of being."

"In gravity's grip, one ceases to experience gravity at all. One feels oneself floating, untethered to the world's binding force; it is as free a state of being as one can experience in life."

"It came as a pleasant shock to me, how the man I'd known as a rather dry intellectual transformed himself so completely into a craftsman - a man who actually made things that the world could put to practical use. Which only goes to show that people are more complicated than they let on, and that even tragedy (sometimes only tragedy) can open the door to who we really are."

"A new sensation swept my body, strange and still. I would know death in this place. What did it mean, to die in a dream? Would it be the same? Would it be a plunge into unbeing, or would I yet find myself passing into some new realm? And the thought came to me that maybe Thea had been right after all, that it was and always would be impossible to know what was dream and what was not; that all creation was boxes within boxes within boxes, each the dream of a different god."

"Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out."

"His gaze widened, then taking in the entirety of the camp. All these people: they were trapped. And not merely by the wires that surrounded them. Physical barricades were nothing compared to the wires of the mind. What had truly imprisoned them was one another. Husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and companions: what they believed had given them strength in their lives had actually done the opposite. Guilder recalled the couple who lived across the street from his townhouse, trading off their sleeping daughter on the way to the car. How heavy that burden must have felt in their arms. And when the end swept down upon them all, they would exit the world on a wave of suffering, their agonies magnified a million times over by the loss of her. Would they have to watch her die? Would they perish first, knowing what would become of her in their absence? Which was preferable? But the answer was neither. Love had sealed their doom. Which was what love did. Guilder's father had taught that lesson well enough."

"So, at the last, a confession. I was the one who did it. Not the Nursery; that was Elise. But the rest of it. The Annex. The drones and watchmen. The splendid houses and grand edifices and endless, temperate days for the privileged few to pass in gentle ease while the unacknowledged masses labored in the shadows of their masters' pleasure. The dream of Prospera may have been Elise's; the design was mine from the start. Why did I do it? What thought possessed me that I should make one person's happy dream another's ceaseless nightmare? Better to ask: Who, having slumbered centuries in paradise, would willingly awaken to build a life from nothing, to hew it from the rock and ice of an alien world? To the colonists I say: I gave you what you needed, which was a weight to push against. A life you would be glad to leave, and a life to make you ready. Do you hate me for this? Surely I have earned your loathing. I will not ask you for forgiveness. For such a crime as mine, there can be no pardon, save for God's alone."

"The mind works wondrously; it is capable of astonishing feats. It is the only machine in nature capable of thinking one thing while knowing its opposite. The bright, busy surface of life - that is the key. How easily it distracts us, like a magician who waves a wand with one hand while, with the other, he plucks a rabbit from his vest. Here is the golden morning, we say; here is the beautiful sea. Here is my beautiful home, my adoring wife, my morning cup of coffee, and my refreshing daybreak swim. We look no deeper into things because we do not desire this; neither are we meant to. That is the design of the world, to trick us into believing it is one thing, when it's entirely another."

"It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own."

"Richards remembered the day - that glorious and terrible day - watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24-7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn't even remember why. He'd thought it right then; no, he'd felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they'd all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees - the subjects hadn't changed, they never would, all coming down, after you'd boiled away the bullshit, to somebody's quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where - but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it."

"I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to. What dark passages."

"It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born."

"As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us."

"And to you, the sleepers in my keeping: you have lived for countless lifetimes, you shall live for countless more. They will be different from the ones you've always known; your days of idleness and ease are gone. This is not a punishment - far from it. It is my gift to you, that you should be redeemed. I will give you childhood, so that you might know innocence. Age, so you will know the prize of youth. Children, so that you will care for the future. Toil, so that you will know the value of a day. The body's failings, so that you will know its worth. Death, so that you will cherish the bittersweet beauty of life. We are, each of us, born a sparkling soul, clothed only in our newness; now you will learn to be another."

"Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte."

"We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on, our little life rounded with a sleep. Thus I beam this tale into the cosmos; this message in a bottle, tossed into heaven's waves. Perhaps there is no one to receive it. Perhaps there is but one mind left to listen: the mind behind all things, like a face beneath the painter's canvas. Whoever you are, in whatever form you take - time, matter, light - I ask one thing only: that you leave us as we are. Let us sleep, and dream, and do the work of being human."

"He returns to the helm. A perfect stillness lies around him; all is bathed in starlight. He could easily doze off himself, so profound is his contentment. How like a dream it all is, he thinks; a perfect dream, this life. He sits that way for a time, watching over his beloveds as they sleep, and, when the moment seems right, brings the bow around, finds the air to fill his sail, and steers his boat towards home."

"To the Editor of the Bulletin: In Professor Hart's most interesting and illuminating article printed in the Alumni Bulletin he remarks that barring certain exceptions "petticoats are considered to have no place in Harvard or a Harvard Catalogue." Unfortunately this statement is only too true, and I believe the time is ripe to take serious account of the important and indispensable services that women are rendering to the University in technical and administrative positions in her offices and her institutions. We have recently read in the papers of the death of Miss Henrietta S. Leavitt of the Astronomical Observatory, whose work in photographic photometry gave her an international reputation... in fact, the services that the women have rendered at the Observatory are too well known in the scientific world to need further comment. ...Harvard should follow the lead already taken by the other large universities of the country, including California, Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale, in recognizing high grade service afforded by women on its staff, and this recognition should be not merely the inclusion of their names in the Catalogue... but should carry with it privileges of retirement and pension funds and of leave of absence at stated periods in order to afford opportunity for study and research. Several of the universities named are already ahead of Harvard in this respect, and in some of them women occupying high grade technical positions take rank with instructors and assistant professors when their acquirements and the nature of their work make them worthy of it. ...my heading "Petticoats in Harvard" is not an attempt to bring up the question is... only a plea for fitting recognition of scholarly work efficiently and faithfully performed in our midst by an unrecognized body of experts."

"I should be willing to pay thirty cents an hour in view of the quality of your work, although our usual price, in such cases, is twenty five cents an hour."

"The following statement regarding the periods of 25 variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud has been prepared by Miss Leavitt."

"He acknowledges the use and calibration of her period-luminosity relation first by Hertzsprung and later by Shapley and ends the “Period- Luminosity Relations to Cepheids” section in his book without ever mentioning that he, Hubble, had used Shapley’s technique. ...Hubble’s underwhelming acknowledgment of Henrietta Leavitt is an example of the ongoing denial and lack of the professional and public recognition that Henrietta Leavitt suffers from, despite her landmark discovery. With the exception of naming a moon crater after her, the profession of astronomy has not done much to celebrate her work. No astronomy prize is named after her and the period-luminosity relation has not been renamed as the H. Leavitt law."

"By the death of Miss Leavitt on December 12, 1921, the Observatory lost an investigator of the highest value. She had obtained a comprehensive experience in photographic photometry, and had developed a clear appreciation of the difficulties involved in the theory and practice of this important research. Her work on standard magnitude sequences was nearly concluded at the time of her death, but she had hardly begun work on her extensive program of photographic measures of variable stars. In the foregoing summary no mention has been made of Miss Leavitt's work on standard photometry..."

"The photographic plates from Peru that Leavitt was studying in Harvard covered two clouds of stars, known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds... During the course of her painstaking work, Leavitt noticed that the Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) showed an overall pattern of behaviour in which the brighter Cepheids... went through their cycle more slowly. The initial discovery was reported in 1908, and by 1912 Leavitt had enough data to pin down this period-luminosity relationship in a mathematical formula, established from her study of twenty-five Cepheids in the SMC. ...Leavitt found a clear mathematical relationship between the apparent brightness of a Cepheid in the SMC and its period... This could only mean that the absolute magnitudes of Cepheids are related to one another in the same way, since the distance effect is essentially the same for all of the Cepheids in the SMC. All that was needed now was to find the distance to just one or two Cepheids in our neighborhood... so that distances... could be worked out from the period-luminosity law that Leavitt had discovered."

"She and others realized that one needed only to calculate the distance to these [Magellanic] Cepheids, which almost certainly were roughly the same distance to the earth, to have a useful yardstick for measuring other distances."

"How far are the spiral nebulae? How large is the universe? We cannot begin to answer these questions unless we measure the distance of heavenly objects. The breakthrough was made by Henrietta Leavitt, who was interested in a rather special class of stars, the Cepheids. The intensity of light coming from Cepheids rises and falls regularly with time... Concentrating on one of the Magellanic Clouds, she found that there was a very close relationship... The brighter the Cepheid was, the longer its period. The distance of the Magellanic Cloud is so great that the stars there can be regarded as all being effectively the same distance from the Earth. If you are in Los Angeles, everybody in Carnegie Hall is about the same distance from you. ...Suppose that a Cepheid in the cloud has a certain brightness and a period of one week. Now look at another Cepheid in some more distant galaxy. If it has the same period, we can assume it has the same intrinsic brightness, and yet it is dimmer than it should be. ...we can work out the relative distance from Earth. A star of the same intrinsic brightness that is twice as far away will be four times dimmer. ...It is slightly complicated by the effects on brightness of interstellar dust clouds, but it was a huge step forward."

"She deserved the Nobel Prize for her work."

"Miss Leavitt was of an especially quiet and retiring nature, and absorbed in her work to an unusual degree. She had the highest esteem of all her associates at the Harvard Observatory, where her loss is keenly felt."

"Apart from her few and very important scientific papers, Leavitt left behind almost no traces of her life. She was born on the Fourth of July 1868 in Lancaster, Mass., and died of cancer on Dec. 12, 1921. Her will tells nearly all. She left an estate worth $314.91, mostly in Liberty Bonds, with a few items such as a desk valued at $5. She never married and had few living relatives. She also left behind a legacy of a great astronomical discovery."

"In addition to these larger labors, Miss Leavitt took part in various minor investigations. She gave considerable time to the discovery of new celestial objects. Altogether, she found 4 new stars, 2400 variable stars, or about one half of the known variables, and various asteroids and other objects."