Dense Quotes (5 quotes)
~~[Unverified]~~ [Louis Pasteur’s] … theory of germs is a ridiculous fiction. How do you think that these germs in the air can be numerous enough to develop into all these organic infusions? If that were true, they would be numerous enough to form a thick fog, as dense as iron.
Webmaster has not yet been able to verify this quote - and is very suspicious of it - but includes it to provide this cautionary note. It appears in several books, such as Rob Kaplan, Science Says (2001), 201-202, which cites “Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, The Universe: The Infinitely Great and the Infinitely Small (1872).” Webmaster has not yet found any information on Pierre Pochet as a 19th-century scientist, anywhere. A similar book title was found as The Universe: The Infinitely Great and the Infinitely Little (1870) but that author is Félix-Archimède Pochet, Director of the Natural History Museum at Rouen. This book, translated from the French, presents germs in the normal way, with no trace of the subject quote to be found in it. The Preface (dated 1867) begins, “My sole object in writing this work was…” implying it was totally authored by F.A. Pochet with no reference to taking over from earlier work by another person. It does, however, have this curious statement: “One of my learned colleagues at the Academy of Sciences lately brought out a similar work, but under a fictitious name,” which F.A. Pochet thought was a questionable practice, and did not provide any name of the individual involved. If you find more definitive information, please contact Webmaster.
A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that “E is dense in E” does not mean the same thing as “E is dense in itself”.
Given, without citation, in A Mathematician’s Miscellany (1953), reissued as Béla Bollobás (ed.), Littlewood’s Miscellany (1986), 57.
Boltzmann was both a wizard of a mathematician and a physicist of international renown. The magnitude of his output of scientific papers was positively unnerving. He would publish two, three, sometimes four monographs a year; each one was forbiddingly dense, festooned with mathematics, and as much as a hundred pages in length.
In 'The Bulldog: A Profile of Ludwig Boltzmann', The American Scholar (1 Jan 1999), 99.
For terrestrial vertebrates, the climate in the usual meteorological sense of the term would appear to be a reasonable approximation of the conditions of temperature, humidity, radiation, and air movement in which terrestrial vertebrates live. But, in fact, it would be difficult to find any other lay assumption about ecology and natural history which has less general validity. … Most vertebrates are much smaller than man and his domestic animals, and the universe of these small creatures is one of cracks and crevices, holes in logs, dense underbrush, tunnels, and nests—a world where distances are measured in yards rather than miles and where the difference between sunshine and shadow may be the difference between life and death. Actually, climate in the usual sense of the term is little more than a crude index to the physical conditions in which most terrestrial animals live.
From 'Interaction of physiology and behavior under natural conditions', collected in R.I. Bowman (ed.), The Galapagos (1966), 40.
When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do. I explored powder white beaches, dense marshes, mangrove forests, and miles of sea grass meadows alive with pink sea urchins, tiny shrimps, and seahorses half the size of my little finger. … Then, in mere decades, not millennia, the blue wilderness of my childhood disappeared: biologic change in the space of a lifetime.
From 'My Blue Wilderness', National Geographic Magazine (Oct 2010), 76.
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) -- 
