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Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index B > Category: Bet

Bet Quotes (13 quotes)

~~[Attributed without source; Very dubious]~~ You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.
Often seen, virally spread, but always without a source citation. If you can provide a primary source, please contact Webmaster. Until then the quote should be regarded as not authenticated. The odds are seen variously expressed as “10-12”, “10 or 12”, “1012”, “10^12”, or “trillion”. [All this sloppiness makes the quote a very dubious one. —Webmaster.]
Science quotes on:  |  Against (332)  |  More (2558)  |  Never (1089)  |  Odds (6)

But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets.
Letter to W. D. Fox, May 1832. In F. Burkhardt and S. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 1821-1836 (1985), Vol. 1, 232.
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Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.
In 'From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long', Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 256.
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I bet it would have been a lot of fun to work with Einstein. What I really respect about Einstein is his desire to throw aside all conventional modes and just concentrate on what seems to be the closest we can get to an accurate theory of nature.
Alan Guth
As quoted by Christina Couch, '10 Questions for Alan Guth, Pioneer of the Inflationary Model of the Universe' (7 Jan 2016) on the website for NPR radio program Science Friday.
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I bet the human brain is a kludge
In Gary William Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature (2000), 383.
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If God didn't create life this way, He certainly missed a good bet.
Remark he made after experiments simulating electric discharges in the primitive atmosphere of the earth produced amino acids molecules (the first step- toward life). As quoted by Carl Sagan in Henry S.F. Cooper Jr., 'A Resonance with Something Alive', collected in Carl Sagan and Tom Head (ed.), Conversations with Carl Sagan (2006), 30. Reprinted from The Search for Life on Mars (1979).
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If you stacked all the US currency together, you could probably reach the moon, but I bet the Apollo programme was still more economical.
In Geoff Tibballs, The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004), 502. If you know the primary source, please contact Webmaster.
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It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use.
From the New York Herald (30 Jan 1879), as cited in Leslie Tomory, 'Building the First Gas Network, 1812-1820', Technology and Culture (Jan 2011), 52, No. 1, 75-102.
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Pauli … asked me to tell him what was happening in America. I told him that Mrs. Wu is trying to measure whether parity is conserved. He answered me: “Mrs. Wu is wasting her time. I would bet you a large sum that parity is conserved.” When this letter came I already knew that parity is violated. I could have sent a telegram to Pauli that the bet was accepted. But I wrote him a letter. He said: “I could never let it out that this is possible. I am glad that we did not actually do the bet because I can risk to lose my reputation, but I cannot risk losing my capital.”
In Discussion after paper presented by Chien-Shiung Wu to the International Conference on the History of Original Ideas and Basic Discoveries, Erice, Sicily (27 Jul-4 Aug 1994), 'Parity Violation' collected in Harvey B. Newman, Thomas Ypsilantis (eds.), History of Original Ideas and Basic Discoveries in Particle Physics (1996), 381.
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The excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win times the probability of winning it.
Anonymous
As quoted, without citation, in Nicholas J. Rose Mathematical Maxims and Minims (1988). Rose attributes the quote to Blaise Pascal, but Webmaster has, so far, found nothing like it by Pascal. Can you help? [Present opinion: This quote does not ring true for Pascal —Webmaster.]
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The picture of scientific method drafted by modern philosophy is very different from traditional conceptions. Gone is the ideal of a universe whose course follows strict rules, a predetermined cosmos that unwinds itself like an unwinding clock. Gone is the ideal of the scientist who knows the absolute truth. The happenings of nature are like rolling dice rather than like revolving stars; they are controlled by probability laws, not by causality, and the scientist resembles a gambler more than a prophet. He can tell you only his best posits—he never knows beforehand whether they will come true. He is a better gambler, though, than the man at the green table, because his statistical methods are superior. And his goal is staked higher—the goal of foretelling the rolling dice of the cosmos. If he is asked why he follows his methods, with what title he makes his predictions, he cannot answer that he has an irrefutable knowledge of the future; he can only lay his best bets. But he can prove that they are best bets, that making them is the best he can do—and if a man does his best, what else can you ask of him?
The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951, 1973), 248-9. Collected in James Louis Jarrett and Sterling M. McMurrin (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy: A Book of Readings (1954), 376.
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Artificial Intelligence quote: There once was a cat named Albert
There once was a cat named Albert’s pet,
Whose physics ideas you wouldn’t forget,
  It solved E=mc^2,
  With a twitch of its tail and a mew,
Proving cats can be smart, that’s a sure bet!
Text by Artificial Intelligence: ChatGPT. Einstein caricature by AI: midjourney. Prompts by Webmaster. (10 Feb 2023)
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We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
Edison in conversation Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931), quoted as a recollection of the author, in James Newton, Uncommon Friends: Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel & Charles Lindbergh (1987), 31. The quote is not cited from a print source. However, in the introduction the author said he “kept a diary in which I noted times and places, key phrases, and vivid impressions.” He also “relied on publications by and about my friends, which jogged my memory.” Webmaster has found no earlier record of this quote, and thus suggests the author may have the gist of what Edison said, but is not quoting the exact words uttered by Edison, although quote marks are used to state what Edison said.
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Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
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