People From Manchester

"You know my favourite Dirac story: I go up to him once and I say, "Professor Dirac, I've just thought of a way of relating the formation of stars to cosmological things — not galaxies, stars — shall I tell you about it?" And he said, "No.""

"A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't when he does feel like it."

"Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If he can't pretend that, he will look through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be."

"The producer. This is a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act."

"The worst of failure in this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers."

"I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuchsia drenched with rain."

"I don't know very much but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it…My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made."

"The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world – that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself."

"Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything."

"Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces."

"Four more byes down the leg side, although Prior was pretty blameless there. However, it does take his byes conceded past the 1,000,000 mark in only his seventh Test, which is quite some achievement. Give that some [name of sponsor deleted] energy, you gobby git."

"I even sponsored them myself, although I don't like really like to talk about my charity, erm, work. Which is a good job because I do so much that you'd never shut me up. If I spoke about it. Which I don't like to do."

"Good stuff from Kemp, who clumps an attempted yorker from Watson down the ground for four before blasting another full-toss through extra-cover. Watson has bowled like a drain today."

"Another one goes, and I'm so underwhelmed that I can't even be bothered to use the obligatory exclamation mark after 'wicket'. All it took was the most rudimentary wicket-to-wicket hustle from Reekers, who is something of a corpulent Ian Austin, and Haq was cleaned up as he played miserably around his pads."

"I like Relentless."

"Fear became my weapon."

"He is the happy wanderer, who goes, Singing upon the way, with eyes awake To every scene, with ears alert to take The sweetness of all sounds; who loves and knows The secrets of the highway, and the rose Holds fairer for the wounds that briars make."

"We shall lodge at the sign of the Grave, you say; Well, the road is a long one we trudge, my friend, So why should we grieve at the break of the day? Let us sing, let us drink, let us love, let us play,-- We can keep our sights for the journey's end."

"It may be we shall know in the hereafter Why we, begetting hopes, give birth to fears, And why the world's too beautiful for laughter, Too gross for tears."

"Friends, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, dead Of plague, famine, and arrows: and the houses Battered unsafe by cannonades of stone Hurled in by the Assyrians: the town-walls Crumbling out of their masonry into mounds Of foolish earth, so smitten by the rams: The hunger-pangs, the thirst like swallowed lime Forcing them gulp green water maggot-quick That lurks in corners of dried cisterns: yea, Murders done for a drink of blood, and flesh Sodden of infants: and no hope alive Of rescue from this heat of prisoning anguish Until Assyrian swords drown it in death."

"The glory of the king of all the kings. You with the golden power on your brows, You kings, I think you know not what you are. First you shall learn yourselves: for neither light Understandeth itself, nor darkness light."

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"And where is now that palace gone, All the magical skill'd stone, All the dreaming towers wrought By Love as if no more than thought The unresisting marble was? How could such a wonder pass? Ah, it was but built in vain Against the stupid horns of Rome, That pusht down into the common loam The loveliness that shone in Spain. But we have raised it up again! A loftier palace, fairer far, Is ours, and one that fears no war. Safe in marvellous walls we are; Wondering sense like builded fires, High amazement of desires, Delight and certainty of love, Closing around, roofing above Our unapproacht and perfect hour Within the splendours of love's power."

"As the cathode rays carry a charge of negative electricity, are deflected by an electrostatic force as if they were negatively electrified, and are acted on by a magnetic force in just the way in which this force would act on a negatively electrified body moving along the path of these rays, I can see no escape from the conclusion that they are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter."

"If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays."

"The discovery by Monsieur and Madame Curie that a sample of radium gives out sufficient energy to melt half its weight of ice per hour has attracted attention to the question of the source from which the radium derives the energy necessary to maintain the radiation; this problem has been before us ever since the original discovery by Becquerel of the radiation from uranium."

"We see from Lenard's table that a cathode ray can travel through air at atmospheric pressure a distance of about half a centimetre before the brightness of the phosphorescence falls to about half its original value. Now the mean free path of the molecules of air at this pressure is about 10-5 cm., and if a molecule of air were projected it would lose half its momentum in a space comparable with the mean free path. Even if we suppose that it is not the same molecule that is carried, the effect of the obliquity of the collisions would reduce the momentum to half in a short multiple of that path. Thus, from Lenard's experiments on the absorption of the rays outside the tube, it follows on the hypothesis that the cathode rays are charged particles moving with high velocities, that the size of the carriers must be small compared with the dimensions of ordinary atoms or molecules. The assumption of a state of matter more finely subdivided than the atom of an element is a somewhat startling one; but a hypothesis that would involve somewhat similar consequences—viz. that the so-called elements are compounds of some primordial element—has been put forward from time to time by various chemists."

"The difficulties which would have to be overcome to make several of the preceding experiments conclusive are so great as to be almost insurmountable."

"Thomson and then his young men demolished a recurrent scientific myth—one that had surfaced again in the 1870's: that there was nothing left to be discovered, nothing new under the sun. Part of the immutable wisdom of the day, endorsed and believed long before the greatest of scientists, Isaac Newton, was a kind of billiard ball theory of the atom, which went back to the ancient Greeks. The word itself is from the Greek atomos, meaning "inidivisible.""

"Notes on Recent Researches in Electricity and Magnetism, published in 1883, had won him enough acclaim at the age of twenty-seven that he was named director of the [Cavendish] laboratory the next year."

"Thomson's work suggested an alternative version—the instability of matter—to that of the indivisible atom. It was revolutionary stuff."

"J. J. Thomson was about to make the most significant find of the late nineteenth century... Thomson had been investigating the nature of cathode rays. He was convinced that they were some kind of electrified particles and, to prove his theory, began testing their behavior in electric or magnetic fields. By measuring both the extent to which such fields deflected them and their electric charge, he discovered that cathode rays consisted of very small negatively charged particles whose mass was about eighteen hundred times smaller than the lightest known substance—the hydrogen atom. ...He initially named these tiny carriers of electricity "corpuscles." Later they would become known as "electrons." The corpuscles were, in fact, the first subatomic particles to be found..."

"His reluctance to pay for elaborate or expensive equipment, perhaps the result of an impoverished childhood, had established the legendary "sealing wax-and-string" tradition of the Cavendish, where everyday materials were ingeniously used to make and patch up experimental equipment, with sealing wax proving particularly useful for vacuum seals."

"Cathode Rays... he adheres to the hypothesis that the rays are due to the violent projection of the negatively charged particles from the cathode. In another abstract from presumably the same lecture, he states that in the cathode discharge the matter is in something beyond the ordinary state and that the carriers of the discharge in a cathode ray are not atoms but something very much smaller; his conclusions are that the particles carrying the charge must be in a much more finely divided state than the ordinary molecule and possibly may be the primordial element; the numerical ration of the mass of the particle to the charge carried is about 1,100 times less than that deduced electrolytically for the hydrogen ion, showing that either the charge must be very great or the particle very small, and it is the latter which he thinks is the case."

"The electron: may it never be of any use to anybody!"

"This example illustrates the differences in the effects which may be produced by research in pure or applied science. A research on the lines of applied science would doubtless have led to improvement and development of the older methods—the research in pure science has given us an entirely new and much more powerful method. In fact, research in applied science leads to reforms, research in pure science leads to revolutions, and revolutions, whether political or industrial, are exceedingly profitable things if you are on the winning side."

"I have described at some length the application of Positive Rays to chemical analysis; one of the main reasons for writing this book was the hope that it might induce others, and especially chemists, to try this method of analysis. I feel sure that there are many problems in chemistry, which could be solved with far greater ease by this than any other method. The method is surprisingly sensitive — more so than even that of spectrum analysis, requires an infinitesimal amount of material, and does not require this to be specially purified; the technique is not difficult if appliances for producing high vacua are available."

"J. J. Thomson, by a rotating-mirror method, succeeded in measuring the velocity of the cathode rays, finding it to be 1.9 x 107 cm./sec.; a value so much smaller than that of the velocity of light that it was scarcely possible to conceive of the rays as vibrations of the aether."

"Thomson's lecture drew from Fitz Gerald the suggestion that "we are dealing with free electrons in these cathode rays"—a remark the point of which will become more evident when we come to consider the direction in which the Maxwellian theory was being developed at this time."

"I have always really liked Tom Jones and I can't wait to see him in action. One thing is for sure, I would rather be singing for a living than getting punched on the head."

"I gave him a look that said 'go on, get up if you want some more'. I've thrown a fair few benders like that in other bouts but to do it against someone of his experience is a bit special."

"He is doing the show 'Dancing with the Stars' and that's how he's boxing."

"Ricky Hatton ain't nothing but a fat man. I'm going to punch him in his beer belly when I see him."

"When I retire, I'll get Ricky Hatton to wash my clothes and cut my lawn and buckle my shoes."

"The Ricky Hatton that beat Kostya Tszyu in 2005 can beat Floyd Mayweather,he was so focused and in such amazing physical shape that he would have given anybody at that level a tough time."

"Ricky Hatton cannot fight. He cannot box. He throws one punch at a time and then holds. There is no skill to what he does in the ring."

"I’ve got a problem with my legs, they just can’t walk past a chippy."

"I've been giving a little gamble on the roulette and just sitting having a coffee with the fans, chatting away."

"It will be an honour to share the ring with José. You only become a great fighter if you share the ring with other great fighters, and that is exactly what José is."

"I was leaving the hotel to get to the fight when my phone went and someone said 'Hello Ricky, it's Tom'. I said 'Tom who?' and when he said 'Tom Jones' I told him to eff off! I thought it was a wind-up!"