User:Wanderer57

Quotations[edit]

"The world is whooshing through space at high speed, but you can't feel it. Objects thrown fast enough away from it circle it and don't fall down. Apparently solid objects are in fact composed almost entirely of nothingness, with tiny invisible objects pushing and pulling at one another over relatively vast distances to manufacture the illusion of their solidity. Most of your ancestors were yoghurt. The gold in your wedding ring was made in massive exploding star, and 10% of the mass of your body was created by the big bang and has been unchanged since. The solid earth you walk on is but a skin on a boiling pudding of boiling rock. 8% of your DNA is viral rather than human, and almost all your cells need a captive bacterium to live. The world is incredibly older, celestial things are incredibly distant, and observable small objects are so incredibly tiny that they fly in the face of any sensible intuition about things. Your brain evolved to gather fruits and berries and to chase mammoths across the plain, and it's a wonder that it can be adapted so well to understand these ideas, which have very little to do with fruits and mammoths at all, so well. None of these things I've mentioned is intuitive; they're all crazy, really, and we've just gotten used to them. There's no reason to suppose the universe happens to be set up in a manner that we can understand, and it'd be a valid concern to worry that we may reach (or may have reached) points beyond which we're not intellectually able to understand things. So it may very well be that, like cows staring blankly at a passing aeroplane, we're just too stupid to properly understand the quantum world." -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 11:20, 5 July 2011 (UTC) -- copied from Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science#why is quantum mechanics weird?

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"Know thyself? If I knew myself I'd run away." - Goethe (quotation swiped from jpgordon)

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"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." - Artist Herman Albright

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"If an article is incomprehensible, try to sort it out through the discussion. If the discussion is also incomprehensible, leave quietly and shut the door behind you." - Wanderer57

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"Wikipedia is set up to reward obsessive whiners like you over science, reason, and truth, represented by me." - Randy Blackamoor

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