Vanished Quotes (3 quotes)
One day a math-deficient frog was sitting on a tiny lily pad in a big pond—a lily pad that doubled in size each night—and on this day the pad covered just one-eighth of the pond. The frog still saw the vast majority of his beloved water and so was unconcerned. Then, just three days later, he woke to find the pond had vanished while he slept.
Epigraph, without citation, 'A sad cautionary tale for frogs with their heads in the sand.' in In Praise of Simple Physics: The Science and Mathematics behind Everyday Questions (2016), 11.
Wait a thousand years and even the garbage left behind by a vanished civilization becomes precious to us.
Epigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 22.
When we look back beyond one hundred years over the long trails of history, we see immediately why the age we live in differs from all other ages in human annals. … It remained stationary in India and in China for thousands of years. But now it is moving very fast. … A priest from Thebes would probably have felt more at home at the council of Trent, two thousand years after Thebes had vanished, than Sir Isaac Newton at a modern undergraduate physical society, or George Stephenson in the Institute of Electrical Engineers. The changes have have been so sudden and so gigantic, that no period in history can be compared with the last century. The past no longer enables us even dimly to measure the future.
From 'Fifty Years Hence', Strand Magazine (Dec 1931). Reprinted in Popular Mechanics (Mar 1932), 57, No. 3, 393.
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) -- 
