Onion Quotes (9 quotes)
[Maria Goeppert Mayer is] the Madonna of the Onion.
As her friend, Pauli, reverently dubbed her, because of her assumption that the protons and neutrons of a nucleus could be found in shells of different energies—like the layers of an onion. As given, without citation, in Joan Dash, A Life of One’s Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married (1973), 196.
By looking at the sun at different wavelengths, we can peel off the different layers in the (solar) atmosphere, just like peeling an onion.
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March 15th. Imperial Banquet for Welcoming the English Cruelty to Animals. MENU OF FOODS: VITAMIN A, Tin Sardines. VITAMIN B, Roasted Beef. VITAMIN C, Small Roasted Suckling Porks. VITAMIN D, Hot Sheep and Onions. VITAMIN E, Spiced Turkey. VITAMIN F, Sweet Puddings. VITAMIN G, Coffee. VITAMIN H, Jam.
In Black Mischief (1932), 1962 edn., 170.
People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m not; I’m just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers, and we’re just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that’s the way it is …
From Interview in BBC TV program Horizon (1981). As quoted in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman 1983, (1999), 23.
The astronomer is severely handicapped as compared with other scientists. He is forced into a comparatively passive role. He cannot invent his own experiments as the physicist, the chemist or the biologist can. He cannot travel about the Universe examining the items that interest him. He cannot, for example, skin a star like an onion and see how it works inside.
In The Nature of the Universe (1950).
The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years. Sooner or later we won’t be able to tell the carrots from the onions.
In The Complete Murphy’s Law: A Definitive Collection(1991), 2.
Two kinds of symbol must surely be distinguished. The algebraic symbol comes naked into the world of mathematics and is clothed with value by its masters. A poetic symbol—like the Rose, for Love, in Guillaume de Lorris—comes trailing clouds of glory from the real world, clouds whose shape and colour largely determine and explain its poetic use. In an equation, x and y will do as well as a and b; but the Romance of the Rose could not, without loss, be re-written as the Romance of the Onion, and if a man did not see why, we could only send him back to the real world to study roses, onions, and love, all of them still untouched by poetry, still raw.
C.S. Lewis and E.M. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1936), 97.
We are peeling an onion layer by layer, each layer uncovering in a sense another universe, unexpected, complicated, and— as we understand more—strangely beautiful.
With co-author A. H. Rosenfeld in 'An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics,' American Scientist, June 1960.
Well loved he garlic, onions, and eke leeks,
And for to drinken strong wine, red as blood.
And for to drinken strong wine, red as blood.
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) -- 
