Informal Quotes (4 quotes)
Ecology has not yet explicitly developed the kind of cohesive, simplifying generalizations exemplified by, say, the laws of physics. Nevertheless there are a number of generalizations that are already evident in what we now know about the ecosphere and that can be organized into a kind of informal set of laws of ecology.
In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (2014).
I make many of my friends by lecturing. I keep the lectures informal, if I can, with lots of discussion, and I never give the same one twice—I’d die of boredom if I did.
As quoted in Frances Glennon, 'Student and Teacher of Human Ways', Life (14 Sep 1959), 143.
Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.
In The Man who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (1975), 226.
Science is, on the whole, an informal activity, a life of shirt sleeves and coffee served in beakers.
From Nobel Banquet Speech (10 Dec 1967), in Les Prix Nobel en 1967, Editor Ragnar Granit, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1968
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) -- 
