Engineers From England

"So that being with Law-Suites, and Riots, wearied and disabled to prosecute his Art and. Invention at present, even until the first Patent was extinct: Nothwithstanding the Author his sad. Sufferings, Imprisonments wrongfully for several thousand pound in the Counter in London, yet did obtaine a new Patent, dated the 2d of May, Anno 14. Caroli Primi of ever Blessed Memory, not only for the making of Iron into cast-works, and bars, but also for the Melting, Extracting, Refing and Reducing of all Mines, Minerals and. Mettals, with Pit-cole, Sea-cole, Peat, and Turf, for the preservation of Wood and Timber of this Island; into which Patent, the Author, for the better support and management of his Invention, so much opposed formerly at the Court, at the Parliament, and at the Law, took in David Ramasey, Esquire, Resident at the Court; Sir George Horsey, at the Parliament; Roger Foulke, Esquire, a Counsellour of the Temple, and an Ingenious Man; and also an Iron Master, my Neighbour, and one who did well know my former Sufferings, and what I had done in the Invention of making of Iron with Pit-cole, etc."

"After I had made a second blast and tryal the fesibility of making iron with pitcole and sea-cole I found by my new invention, the quality to be good and profitable, but the quantity did not exceed above 3 tuns per week."

"Having former knowledge and delight in Iron Works of my Fathers, when I was but a Youth; afterward at 20 years, Old, was I fetched from Oxford, then of Bayliol Colledge, Anno 1619, to look and manage 3 iron works of my fathers, 1 furnace, and 2 forges, in the Chase of Pensnet, in Worcester-shire, but Wood and Charcole, growing then scant, and Pit-coles in great quantities abounding near the furnace, did induce me to alter my furnace, and to attempt by my new invention, the making of iron with pit-cole, assuring myself in my invention, the loss to me could not be greater then others, not so great, "although my success should prove fruitless; but I found such success at first tryal animated me, for at my tryal or blast I made iron to profit with pit-cole, and found Facere est addere Invention!."

"There never have been wanting men to whom England's improvement by sea and land was one of the dearest thoughts of their lives, and to whom England's good was the foremost of their worldly considerations. And such, emphatically, was Andrew Yarranton, a true patriot in the best sense of the word."

"I was an apprentice to a linnen-draper when this king was born, and continued at the trade some years, but the shop being too narrow and short for my large mind, I took leave of my master, but said nothing. Then I lived a country-life for some years; and in the late wars I was a soldier, and sometimes had the honour and misfortune to lodg and dislodg an army. In the year 1G52, I entred upon iron works, and pli'd them several years, and in them times I made it my business to survey the three great rivers of England, and some small ones; and made two navigable, and a third almost compleated. I next studied the great weakness of the rye-lands, and the surfeit it was then under by reason of their long tillage. I did by practick and theorick find out the reason of its defection, as also of its recovery, and applyed the remedy in putting out two books, which were so fitted to the country-man's capacity, that he fell on pell-mell; and I hope, and partly know, that great part of Worcestershire, Glocestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire, have doubled the value of the land by the husbandry discovered to them; see my two books printed by Mr Sawbridg on Ludgate Hill, entitled, Yarranton's Improvement ly Clover, and there thou mayest be further satisfied.* I also for many years served the countreys with the seed, and at last gave them the knowledg of getting it with ease and small trouble; and what I have been doing since, my book tells you at large."

"Andrew Yarranton, Gentlemen was the founder of English political economy, the first man in England who saw and said that peace was better than war, that trade was better than plunder, that honest industry was better than martial greatness, and that the best occupation of a government was to secure prosperity at home, and let other nations alone."

"The great Inventor is one who has walked forth upon the industrial world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and decked with honors, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot and oil."

"Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility"

"The definition I use for a pattern is an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others"

"It is commonly said that a pattern, however it is written, has four essential parts: a statement of the context where the pattern is useful, the problem that the pattern addresses, the forces that play in forming a solution, and the solution that resolves those forces. … it supports the definition of a pattern as "a solution to a problem in a context", a definition that [unfortunately] fixes the bounds of the pattern to a single problem-solution pair"

"When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature."

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."

"Refactoring (noun): a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing the observable behavior of the software. To refactor (verb): to restructure software by applying a series of refactorings without changing the observable behavior of the software."

"Often you'll see the same three or four data items together in lots of places: fields in a couple of classes, parameters in many method signatures. Bunches of data that hang around together really ought to be made into their own objects."

"When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous."

"The key is to test the areas that you are most worried about going wrong. That way you get the most benefit for your testing effort. It is better to write and run incomplete tests than not to run complete tests"

"Steve Mellor and I independently came up with a characterization of the three modes in which people use the UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language. By far the most common of the three, at least to my biased eye, is UML as a sketch. In this usage, developers use the UML to help communicate some aspects of a system. As with blueprints, you can use sketches in a forward-engineering or reverse-engineering direction. Forward engineering draws a UML diagram before you write code, while reverse engineering builds a UML diagram from the existing code in order to help understand it."

"The key books about object-oriented graphical modeling languages appeared between 1988 and 1992. Leading figures included Grady Booch [Booch,OOAD]; Peter Coad [Coad, OOA], [Coad, OOD]; Ivar Jacobson (Objectory) [Jacobson, OOSE]; Jim Odell [Odell]; Jim Rumbaugh (OMT) [Rumbaugh, insights], [Rumbaugh, OMT]; Sally Shlaer and Steve Mellor [Shlaer and Mellor, data], [Shlaer and Mellor, states] ; and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (Responsibility Driven Design) [Wirfs-Brock]."

"Modeling Principle: Models are not right or wrong; they are more or less useful."

"Often designers do complicated things that improve the capacity on a particular hardware platform when it might actually be cheaper to buy more hardware."

"One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is to avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase."

"Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a 'refactoring') does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it's less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring."

"Transparency is valuable, but while many things can be made transparent in distributed objects, performance isn't usually one of them."

"People also underestimate the time they spend debugging. They underestimate how much time they can spend chasing a long bug. With testing, I know straight away when I added a bug. That lets me fix the bug immediately before it can crawl off and hide. There are few things more frustrating or time-wasting than debugging. Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot quicker if we just didn't create the bugs in the first place?"

"The second problem [with using UML for the purposes of this book] is that the Unified Modeling Language concentrates on implementation modeling rather than conceptual modeling"

"Graphical design notations have been with us for a while... their primary value is in communication and understanding. A good diagram can often help communicate ideas about design, particularly when you want to avoid a lot of details. Diagrams can also help you understand either a software system or a business process. As part of a team trying to figure out something, diagrams both help to understand and communicate that understanding throughout a team. Although they aren't, at least yet, a replacement for textual programming languages, they are a helpful assistant... Of these graphical notations, the UML's importance comes from its wide use and standardization within the OO development community."

""The surrender and succeeding jubilation was rightly American but, as Admiral Fraser appreciated, Britain and the Commonwealth had now been at war for six long years less a day. If the forenoon had been American, then the evening would be British. The last sunset ceremony had been carried out on the evening of September 2,1939. Since then the White Ensign had flown in every ship by day and night. Admiral Fraser ordered the resumption of sunset routine as from September 2, 1945 and invited all the senior officers of British ships in Tokyo, and a token number of sailors from each, to witness the ceremony in his flagship. He was dissuaded from firing a sunset gun in case some trigger-happy American or Japanese thought the war had re-started."

"Dirac, in his first paper, in contrast to what his “hole”-theory implied, had identified the positively charged particle corresponding to the electron also with the proton. However, after Weyl had pointed out that Dirac’s hole theory led to equal masses, he changed his mind and gave the new particle the same mass as the electron."

"If we are honest — and scientists have to be — we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards — in heaven if not on earth — all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins."

"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation."

"At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time. This idea was first put forward by Milne, who worked it out on... assumptions... not very satisfying... we should expect them also to depend on position in space, in order to preserve the beautiful idea of the theory of relativity [that] there is fundamental similarity between space and time."

"One possibility in this direction is to regard, classically, an electron as the end of a single Faraday line of force. The electric field in this picture from discrete Faraday lines of force, which are to be treated as physical things, like strings. One has then to develop a dynamics for such a string like structure, and quantize it.... In such a theory a bare electron would be inconceivable, since one cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string."

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite!"

"With my assumption... life need never end. There is no decisive argument for deciding between [certain] assumptions. I prefer the one that allows the possibility of endless life. One may hope that some day the question will be decided by direct observation."

"It was a good description to say that it was a game, a very interesting game one could play. Whenever one solved one of the little problems, one could write a paper about it. It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since then."

"I don't suppose that applies so much to other physicists; I think it’s a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don’t have any physical meaning at all. Sometimes they do."

"If there is no complete agreement between the results of one's work and the experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged."

"The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research."

"I want to emphasize the necessity for a sound mathematical basis for any fundamental physical theory. Any philosophical ideas that one may have play only a subordinate role. Unless such ideas have a mathematical basis they will be ineffective."

"I went back to Cambridge at the beginning of October, 1925, and resumed my previous style of life, intense thinking about these problems during the week and relaxing on Sunday, going for a long walk in the country alone... It was during one of the Sunday walks in October, 1925, when I was thinking very much about this uv - vu, in spite of my intention to relax, that I thought about Poisson brackets. I remembered something which I had read up previously in advanced books of dynamics about these strange quantities, Poisson brackets, and from what I could remember, there seemed to be a close similarity between a Poisson bracket of two quantities, u and v, and the commutator uv - vu. The idea first came in a flash, I suppose, and provided of course some excitement, and then of course came the reaction "No, this is probably wrong." I did not remember very well the precise formula for a Poisson bracket, and only had some vague recollections. But there were exciting possibilities there, and I thought that I might be getting to some big new idea... it was a Sunday evening then and the libraries were all closed. I just had to wait impatiently through that night without knowing whether this idea was really any good or not, but still I think that my confidence gradually grew during the course of the night. The next morning I hurried along to one of the libraries as soon as it was open, and then I looked up Poisson brackets in Whittaker's Analytical Dynamics, and I found that they were just what I needed."

"My research work was based in pictures. I needed to visualise things and projective geometry was often most useful e.g. in figuring out how a particular quantity transforms under Lorentz transf[ormation]. When I came to publish the results I suppressed the projective geometry as the results could be expressed more concisely in analytic form."

"It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form. Some further changes will be needed, just about as drastic as the changes made in passing from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. Some day a new quantum mechanics, a relativistic one, will be discovered, in which we will not have these infinities occurring at all. It might very well be that the new quantum mechanics will have determinism in the way that Einstein wanted."

"God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world."

"A good deal of my research work in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problems, but simply examining mathematical quantities of a kind that physicists use and trying to get them together in an interesting way regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later that the work does have an application. Then one has had good luck."

"The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things."

"The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."

"I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it."

"If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand. Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had to wait until I have felt the mathematics led me by the hand. It has led me along an unexpected path, a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one can set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress."

"I have the best of reasons for being an admirer of Werner Heisenberg. He and I were young research students at the same time, about the same age, working on the same problem. Heisenberg succeeded where I failed. There was a large mass of spectroscopic data accumulated at that time and Heisenberg found out the proper way of handling it. In doing so he started the golden age in theoretical physics, and for a few years after that it was easy for any second rate student to do first rate work."

"Classical mechanics has been developed continuously from the time of Newton and applied to an ever-widening range of dynamical systems, including the electromagnetic field in interaction with matter. The underlying ideas and the laws governing their application form a simple and elegant scheme, which one would be inclined to think could not be seriously modified without having all its attractive features spout. Nevertheless it has been found possible to set up a new scheme, called quantum mechanics, which is more suitable for the description of phenomena on the atomic scale and which is in some respects more elegant and satisfying than the classical scheme. This possibility is due to the changes which the new scheme involves being of a very profound character and not clashing with the features of the classical theory that make it so attractive, as a result of which all these features can be incorporated in the new scheme."