Sublime

En sa qualité de mathématicien, Dyson se qualifiait lui-même de grenouille, mais il reconnaissait qu’il était « stupide de dire que les oiseaux sont meilleurs que les grenouilles parce qu’ils voient plus loin ou que les grenouilles sont supérieures aux oiseaux parce qu’elles voient plus profond ». Le monde est à la fois vaste et profond. « Nous avo

Quel conseil donneriez-vous à un étudiant malin qui va se lancer dans la vie active ? Ne vous inquiétez pas de ce que vous ferez pour le restant de votre vie. Trouvez simplement une occupation rentable et intéressante pour les trois ou cinq années à venir.

In Paris later, at the Museum of Natural History (the Jardin des Plantes), with the blessing and counsel of the great Georges Cuvier, he undertook his vast, illustrated Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, at a time when fewer than a dozen generic types of fossil fish had been named and he was all of twenty-four.

I came into the room which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye an

to avoid this problem of fooling yourself is simply to ask lots of questions. Feynman took this approach himself: “Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these ‘dumb’ questions: ‘Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?’”*16 How many of us lack the c