"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. [...] The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

"Over 2,000 years ago, the Greeks thought they had it all worked out. In their cosmology, the entire Universe was composed of four elements: earth, wind, fire and water. Now, despite several millennia of effort, modern cosmologists are significantly worse off. We have no idea what the bulk of the Universe is composed of."

"another famous quotation, this time from Maurice Goldhaber, who put one of the first limits on proton decay by declaring that if the proton had a lifetime less than about 10^17 years, "You could feel it in your bones!". By this he meant that proton decays in our body would be so frequent that we would die from the radiation exposure."

"No data were taken at station D during the period 0830 to 1630 GST due to the presence of a red racer snake (Coluber constrictor) draped across the high-tension wires (33,000 V) serving the station. However, even though this snake, or rather a three-foot section of its remains, was caught in the act of causing an arc between the transmission lines, we do not consider it responsible for the loss of data. Rather we blame the incompetence of a red-tailed hawk (Buteo borealis) who had apparently built a defective nest that fell off the top of the nearby transmission tower, casting her nestlings to the ground, along with their entire food reserve consisting of a pack rat, a kangaroo rat, and several snakes, with the exception of the above-mentioned snake who had a somewhat higher destiny. No comparable loss of data occurred at the other antenna sites."

"If you were awarded a Pulitzer, Nobel, or other prize in recognition of past accomplishments ... you do not include this prize in your income if you meet all of the following requirements..."

"Franken's first demonstration of nonlinear optical frequency conversion in 1961 employed a quartz crystal to double the frequency of 694-nm light from a ruby laser. Because that interaction was not phase matched, the ultraviolet output power was so small that the editors at Physical Review Letters mistook for a blemish the spot on Franken's spectrograph plate that demonstrated the new effect. They airbrushed it out of the published version, rendering the first evidence of nonlinear frequency conversion truly invisible."

"But whereas the sylvanshine on a tree is visible to anyone in the car or holding a torch, heiligenschein, the result of sunlight focused by dewdrops held above a leaf's surface by fine hairs, appears to each observer as a halo around the head of just his own shadow on the grass. In his Memoirs of 1562, Benvenuto Cellini, no expert on the laws of optics, interpreted this instead as a sign of divine grace towards himself; and, says Fraser wryly, evidently none of those to whom Cellini vouchsafed his secret dared mention the halo about his own head."

Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cutoff of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Band cutoff. It has lost sixty seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy three miles at present.

Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and `let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here!... Please observe: In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

"Theorists conduct experiments with their brains. Experimenters have to use their hands, too. Theorists are thinkers, experimenters are craftsmen. The theorist needs no accomplice. The experimenter has to muster graduate students, cajole machinists, flatter lab assistants. The theorist operates in a pristine place free of noise, of vibration, of dirt. The experimenter develops an intimacy with matter as a sculptor does with clay, battling it, shaping it, and engaging it. The theorist invents his companions, as a naive Romeo imagined his ideal Juliet. The experimenter's lovers sweat, complain, and fart."

"When two parameters correlate, there is probably a connection, but this does not necessarily imply a direct causal relationship. For example in Mediterranean countries there is a good overall correlation between birthrates and stork density. However, neither the notion that babies evolve into storks, or that storks bring babies, seems a viable hypothesis in the light of other evidence."

"I also remember Len Hibbard, another of the more senior staff members, remarking half in jest, half in earnest, that there were two ways of pronouncing the word "laboratory". In American useage the accent was on the first syllable; in English, on the second. `But it is clear', he continued, `that the accent should be on the "labor", and not on the "oratory"."

"Work on faint objects or that involving the blue end of the spectrum can only be done in dark time. Thus one is more likely to find astronomers whose research involves the infrared part of the spectrum working on nights of the full Moon, which only confirms what we always believed about infrared astronomers." Vader, J.P. et al. 1993, AJ, 106, 1743, Sec 3.1:

"Unfortunately, just before submitting this paper, all digital spectra disappeared with the loss of magnetic tapes during a move and of optical disks in a computer crash. We therefore cannot display here clean copies of the calibrated spectra. `Dirty' paper copies are available from JPV upon request."

"The bulk of the data was obtained at the KPNO 1.3 m telescope. For the majority of these observing runs, the Hermann InSb infrared photometer was used. On few occasions when Hermann was ill, his less- sensitive brother Otto was used."

"The most notable consequence of the impacts was the dark features that resulted from the fallback of the plume onto the atmosphere. This dark material has come to be known technically as the 'brown stuff'."

"He grew profoundly depressed. At one point, he had nightmares in which he was visited by images of his own abdomen as a kind of mathematical appendage with "singularities," points in space marked by indefinable mathematical surges like those he and Hardy had explored in their partitions work. Intense pain might show up at x = 1, half as much pain at x = -1, and so on. The nightmares recurred."

"Einstein made Mach's principle a founding assumption of General Relativity. He was, therefore, vastly annoyed when Kurt Godel, having recovered from destroying mathematics, derived from General Relativity a most un-Machian model universe."

"The components should be moving at about 35 uarcsec/year, detectable in VLBI images within a few years. That the motion has not already been seen implies a lower limit to the source distance of 5.4 Mpc (Greenhill et al. 1995), though a typographical error has converted the limit in the abstract to 5.4 pc (which we never doubted)."

"The oldest paper to appear (for the first time) during the index year was Ioffe (1994), written in 1952-53, on the effects of polarization on the escape of high-energy photons from ionized gases."

"We had thought that the record for archival observatory plates on loan belonged to images of M55 taken from Harvard by I.R.King and returned to V. Trimble 40 years later, but they cannot compete with the "plates that were lent to Prof. Pickering 1912 June 28" (Goffin 1995)."

"Fraud. Fraudulently obtained unemployment compensation is fully taxable and you report it on line 21, Form 1040."

"But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number."

"However, surely their place on the roll is below that of Charles Greeley Abbot, who studied solar radiation from the time he reached the Smithsonian Institution in 1895 until shortly before his death in December 1973 at the age of 101... Abbot was scientifically active through seven sunspot cycles, and I remember hearing that a Fourier transform of the number of his papers showed a peak with that 11-year period."

"In fact, the green tree frog's scientific name, Litoria caerulea, actually means blue tree frog. In 1790 it became the first frog species described from Australia. The specimens, collected by Joseph Banks, were sent to England preserved in alcohol (probably rum), which leached out the yellow pigment, turning them blue"

"Polaroid photography itself was initiated during that time, too: In December 1943, on a family vacation in Santa Fe, Land's three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn't see instantly the picture Land took of her. Within the hour, he had thought through the camera, the film and the physical chemistry that could do the job. Instant photography had been perfected "except for those few details that took from 1943 to 1973," as he recalled later."

Corrigendum
Nonconservation of Baryons in Cosmology - Revisited
Narlikar, J. V. 1984, J. Astrophys. Astr. 5, 67-78

"The adjective 'late' appearing before the name of M. H. L. Pryce in the last line of p. 68 in the above paper is regretted. The author is happy to learn that Dr M. H. L. Pryce is alive and well and is at present Honorary Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. This note records the author's apology to Professor Pryce.

"Acknowledgement
The author's participation in the 14th Texas Symposium was supported by the Internal Revenue Service through a Schedule A, line 20 deduction."

Physics Seminar: 4 pm, Workman 101. Tech graduate student Joe Gatto will speak on "The Effects of Luggage on Explosive Detonations Inside a Unit Load Device: My First Mistake."