Tenuous Quotes (3 quotes)
The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier’s own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier’s ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.
From The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2000, 2011), 114, previously published in an article in Natural History Magazine. Gould was writing about tangibly having Lavoisier’s signature on proof plates bought at an auction. (The plates were made to accompany Lavoisier’s sole geological article of 1789.)
The soul seems to be a very tenuous substance … [and] seems to be made of a most subtle texture, extremely mobile or active corpuscles, not unlike those of flame or heat; indeed, whether they are spherical, as the authors of atoms propound, or pyramidical as Plato thought, or some other form, they seem from their own motion and penetration through bodies to create the heat which is in the animal.
As quoted in Margaret J. Osler and Paul Lawrence Farber (eds.), Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall (2002), 169.
We were able to see the plankton blooms resulting from the upwelling off the coast of Chile. The plankton itself extended along the coastline and had some long tenuous arms reaching out to sea. The arms or lines of plankton were pushed around in a random direction, fairly well-defined yet somewhat weak in color, in contrast with the dark blue ocean. The fishing ought to be good down there.
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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) -- 
