Academics From The United States

"The pragmatist regards any theory as a mere mathematical machine for generating numbers which he then compares with experiment. A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. The pragmatist refuses on principle to speculate about deep reality, such a concept being meaningless from his point of view. Pragmatism is an intelectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy."

"Most everywhere, most of the time, the world dwells in an unmeasured state."

"Physicists, for all their odd notions, are basically a conservative lot."

"Though today's quantum theory shows no sign of weakness, someday it may collapse."

"Quantum physics emerged from the Stone Age with an embarrassment of riches - three quantum theories, each claiming to explain the world. As it turned out, all three were right."

"One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality."

"Although mathematics originates in the human mind, its remarkable effectiveness in explaining the world does not extend to the mind itself. Psychology has proved unusually resistant to the mathematization that works so well in physics."

"One of the curious features of modern physics is that in spite of its overwhelming success in explaining a vast range of physical phenomena from quark to quasar, it fails to give us a single metaphor for how the universe really works."

"A small, but interesting, portion of baseball can be understood on the basis of physical principles. The flight of balls, the liveliness of balls, the structure of bats, and the character of the collisions of balls and bats are a natural province of physics and physicists."

"Much of the subtlety of baseball is derived from the fact that so much of the game is played in the region between definitely smooth flow and definitely turbulent flow, at ball velocities greater than 50 mph and smaller than 120 mph."

"The maximum Magnus force on a ball spinning at a rate of 1800 rpm is seen to be about one-third of the weight of the ball, so we cannot expect a ball spinning at that rate to curve more than one third of the distance it will fall under gravity."

"Note that the ball falls at a rather large angle at the end of its flight; the trajectories are not symmetric."

"Almost all of fluid dynamics follows from a differential equation called the Navier-Stokes equation. But this general equation has not, in practice, led to solutions of real problems of any complexity. In this sense, the curve of a baseball is not understood; the Navier-Stokes equation applied to a base ball has not been solved."

"Control pitchers hit corners with an uncertainty of about 3". One must be a fairly good shot to shoot a pistol with that accuracy."

"Balls curve as a consequence of asymmetries in the resistance of the air through which they pass."

"Every 3 feet of lead is worth about one-tenth of a second, and a rolling start is worth a good half second. Indeed, the difference between the runner having his weight mainly on his front foot and mainly on his back foot (but don't let the pitcher catch you leaning!) must be worth more than one-tenth of a second."

"We not that those players with weaker arms might be better off throwing at a lower angle to get the ball to the plate on the bounce. If the surface is Astroturf, the 90-mph player can gain as much as 0.2 seconds, or 6 feet, on the runner by throwing on the bounce. But if his team is playing on grass and his groundskeeper has kept the grass long and well watered to help his team (which relies on singles, speed, and baserunning), the ball may lose so much speed at the bounce that nothing will be gained."

"To hit a baseball with dispatch, one needs both to step into the ball and to rotate."

"The American ash from which bats are made has an unusually high strength-to-weight ratio. Ash was celebrated in medieval times as the only proper wood from which to construct the lances of knights errant; an ash lance was light enough to carry and wield and strong enough to impale the opposition."

"Systems can create consequences not intended by any other of their constituent actors."

"Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties."

"Power, like love, is easier to experience than to define or measure."

"Power conversion is the capacity to convert potential power, as measured by resources, to realized power, as measured by the changed behavior of others."

"Some say precipitating events are like buses - they come along every ten minutes."

"Chamberlain's sins were not his intentions, but rather his ignorance and arrogance in failing to appraise the situation properly. And in that failure he was not alone."

"Some observers feel it is harder to change public opinion in democracies than it is to change policies in totalitarian countries."

"The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it."

"Effective foreign policymaking requires an understanding of not only international and transnational systems, but also the intricacies of domestic politics in multiple countries. It also demands recognition of just how little is known about “building nations,” particularly after revolutions – a process that should be viewed in terms of decades, not years."

"Some economists believe that the Great Depression of the 1930s was aggravated by bad monetary policy and lack of American leadership. Britain was too weak to maintain an open international economy, and the United States was not living up to its new responsibilities."

"Governments now have to share the stage with actors who can use information to enhance their soft power and press governments directly, or indirectly by mobilizing their publics."

"Attention rather than information becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power."

"The territorial state has not always existed in the past, so it need not necessarily exist in the future."

"Just as gunpowder and infantry penetrated and destroyed the medieval castle, so have nuclear missiles and the internet made the nation-state obsolete."

"If Thucydides were plopped down in the Middle East or East Asia, he would probably recognize ... the situation quite quickly."

"The bipolar world is over, but it not going to be replaced by a unipolar world empire that the United States controls alone. The world is already economically multipolar, and there will be a diffusion of power as the information revolution progresses, interdependence increases, and transnational actors become more important. The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that."

"When words are both descriptive and prescriptive, thyey become political words used in struggles for power."

"In foreign policy, as in medicine, leaders must “first do no harm.”"

"The world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a strange cocktail of continuity and change. Some aspects of international politics have not changed since Thucydides. There is a certain logic of hostility, a dilemma about security that goes with interstate politics. Alliances, balance of power, and choices in in policy between war and compromise have remained similar over the millennia."

"I have found in my experience in government that I could ignore neither the age-old nor the brand-new dimensions of world politics."

"Any sense of global community is weak."

"Cooperation is difficult in the absence of communication."

"No one can tell the whole story of anything."

"The cure to misunderstanding history is to read more, not less."

"At some point, consequences matter."

"Anarchy means without government, but it does not necessarily mean chaos or total disorder."

"The international system consists not only of states. The international political system is the pattern of relationships among the states."

"Leonardo was not always a giant. He made mistakes. He went off on tangents, literally, pursuing math problems that became time-sucking diversions. Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished, most notably the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, and the Battle of Anghiari. As a result, there exist now at most fifteen paintings fully or mainly attributable to him. Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings are a window into his fevered, imaginative, manic, and sometimes elated mind. Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty-first century, he may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviate his mood swings and attention-deficit disorder. One need not subscribe to the artist-as-troubled-genius trope to believe we are fortunate that Leonardo was left to his own devices to slay his demons while conjuring up his dragons."

"The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century."

"For Einstein, as for most people, a belief in something larger than himself became a defining sentiment. It produced in him an admixture of confidence and humility that was leavened by a sweet simplicity. Given his proclivity toward being self-centered, these were welcome graces. Along with his humor and self-awareness, they helped him to avoid the pretense and pomposity that could have afflicted the most famous mind in the world. His religious feelings of awe and humidity also informed his sense of social justice. It impelled him to cringe at trappings of hierarchy or class distinction, to eschew excess consumption and materialism, and to dedicate himself to efforts on behalf of refugees and the oppressed."

"Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was, at least for most of his life, more comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy. Throughout his life he would refer to himself as "B. Franklin, printer." From these attitudes spring what may be Franklin's most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class. Instinctively more comfortable with democracy than were his fellow founders, and devoid of the snobbery that later critics would feel toward his own shopkeeping values, he had faith in the wisdom of the common man and felt that a new nation would draw its strength from what he called "the middling people." Through his self-improvement tips for cultivating personal virtues and his civic-improvement schemes for furthering the common good, he helped to create, and to celebrate, a new ruling class of ordinary citizens."