Sedulia's Quotations

Leonard Kleinrock: The first message ever sent on the internet was "Lo"

At 10:30 p.m. on October 29, 1969, Charley Kline, one of my programmers, and I sat down and started to log on from UCLA to SRI [Stanford Research Institute]. This was a big event, because it was going to test communication  on this first link of the nascent Internet called the Arpanet. Charley was at the keyboard. He did the typing. We had the telephone headset, so we could speak to SRI. All we wanted to do was long on. So Charley typed an L. "You get the L?" "Got the L." "Did you get the O?" "Got the O." Typed the G. "Did you get the G?" And crash! The system went down. That baby crashed. There had been a memory overflow at SRI. We liked that, because it wasn't our machine, and secondly it wasn't the network. That was most important. So the first message wasn't "What hath God wrought?" It wasn't "This is a giant leap for mankind." It even, you know, "Come here, Watson. I need you." Those guys were smart. They had a great message planned ahead of time. They understood the media and PR, and they had the press there. We had nobody-- no camera, no voice recorder, nothing. So the first message ever sent on the Internet was "Lo," as in "Lo and behold." Truth is, we couldn't have created a better, more concise message. It was prophetic.

       --Leonard Kleinrock (1934-), one of the fathers of the internet. Quoted in "Feature Shock," article by Debbie Kim in Los Angeles magazine, March 2009

Freeman Dyson on why the atom was split

When the first atom was split in 1932, the newspaper man asked Rutherford why he split atoms and Rutherford said, "Oh, we're like children, we have to take the watch apart to see how it works." And I think that is absolutely right. That's how it all began....It was our nature that we just are tinkerers, and then of course it turned out that when you did that with uranium that it fell apart in an even more spectacular way, which we call fission. And as soon as you discovered that, then you knew how to make bombs.

    --Freeman Dyson (1923-) in "Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic," a television show that premieres on PBS in December 2008. Cited in Science News, 20 December 2008

Randolph Nesse on new ideas versus universities

Randolph M. Nesse "used to believe that truth had a special home at universities." Mr. Nesse, professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan and an expert on evolution and medicine, now thinks "universities may be the best show in town for truth pursuers, but most of them stifle innovation and constructive engagement of real controversies -- not just sometimes but most of the time, systematically." Faculty committees, he complains, make sure that most positions "go to people just about like themselves." Deans ask how much external financing new hires will bring in. "No one with new ideas ... can hope to get through this fine sieve."

     --Josh Fischman, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus (15 December 2008) about a new anthology, What Have You Changed Your Mind About? in which 150 "big thinkers" discuss things they once believed.

Senator McCain is aware of the World Wide Web

Asked earlier this year if he uses a Mac or PC, McCain replied: "Neither. I'm an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all the assistance I can get." The running McCain-doesn't-get-the-Web meme climbed a steeper hill nearly a month ago when a McCain aide -- his deputy eCampaign director, no less -- told a bipartisan gathering of online political activists: "John McCain is aware of the Internet." And last Sunday, in an interview with the New York Times, McCain said he doesn't e-mail.

    --Article by Jose Antonio Vargas in the Washington Post, 18 July 2008

Jenny Randles: The laws of physics are designed to facilitate time travel

It is more and more apparent that the laws of physics are designed to facilitate time travel, not to deny it.

   --From Breaking the Time Barrier (2005), Jenny Randles

Sir Ken Robinson on university professors

They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head to meetings.

  --Sir Ken Robinson on university professors

John Hawks: Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes.

Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes.

--Anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, discussing recent findings that imply that human evolution has been rapid within the past 10,000 years. From an article by David Biello in Scientific American, December 10, 2007

Fran Lebowitz: In real life there is no such thing as algebra

Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

  --Fran Lebowitz (1950- ), in Social Studies (1981)

James D. Watson on science and Lawrence Summers, ex-president of Harvard

Only two years were to pass before Summers' inability to get outside his own head would land him in fatally hot water. The boiling point was reached following an appearance at a conference on women in science held in Cambridge in mid-January of 2005. There he suggested that the relatively small number of women in tenured positions in the physical sciences might in part be attributable to a relatively low frequency among females of innate potential for doing science at the highest level. Obviously aware that this was not to be welcomed as the most palatable hypothesis, he was careful to offer as well the more broadly subscribed-to alternative explanation that many talented women had been strongly discouraged by their teachers from ever trying to master top level mathematics and science.

Summers' remarks might have gone unnoticed outside the meeting were it not for the presence of my former student, now a professor of biology at MIT, Nancy Hopkins. Over the past decade she had worked tirelessly to improve the working conditions of women scientists there. Before Nancy's highly visible efforts, the salaries and space assignments of women at MIT were notably unequal to those of their male counterparts. But Nancy did not challenge Summers at the meeting. Instead she bolted from the room, later saying Summers' words made her sick, and soon appeared on TV attacking him.

It did Nancy Hopkins no credit as a scientist to admit that the mere utterance of a hypotheses that there might be genetic differences between male and female brains-- and therefore differences in the distribution of one form of cognitive potential-- made her sick. Anyone sincerely interested in understanding the imbalance in the representation of men and women in science must be prepared to consider the extent to which nature may figure in the matter. To my regret, Summers, instead of standing firm, within a week apologized publicly three times. Except for the psychologist Steve Pinker, no prominent Harvard scientist uttered a word in Summers' defense, the majority, I suspect, fearful of being tarred with the brush of political incorrectness. If I had still been a member of the faculty, the number of tenured scientists standing visibly behind the president in this matter would have literally doubled.

The women-and-science firestorm by itself did not lead to Summers' resignation in February 2006 as Harvard's president. It was merely the culmination of hundreds of more private displays on his part of seemingly rude disregard for the social niceties....

It may be, however, that Summers is not entirely to blame for his social ineptitude. His repeated failures to comprehend the emotional states of those he presided over might be indicative of the genetic hand he was dealt as a mathematical economist.... The social incapacity of mathematicians is no mere stereotype; many of the most brilliant are mild to full-blown cases of Asperger's syndrome (the high-intelligence form of autism), perhaps the most genetically determined of known human behavioral "disabilities." Like exceptional math aptitude, Asperger's occurs five times more frequently in males than in females. Why this is so will remain a mystery without much more effort at uncovering how genes control the relative development and functioning of male and female brains.

If Summers' tactlessness does have a genetic basis, much of the anger against him should rightly yield to sympathy....

    --James D. Watson (1928- ) in Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science

James D. Watson on the influence of genetic factors on behavior and intelligence

Before leaving [president pro tem of Harvard, Derek] Bok's temporary office in Loeb House, mindful of the Summers fiasco, I remarked to Derek that the time was not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians. Since 1978, when a pail of water had been dumped over E.O. Wilson for saying that genes influence the behavior of humans as well as of other animals, the assault against behavioral science by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But as science is able to prove its hypotheses ever more indisputably, such irrationality must recede or betray itself as such. In showing that human genes do matter, behavioral biologists will no longer be limited to comparisons of fraternal and identical twins. Soon the cost of sequencing the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs of individual DNA molecules will drop to a thousandth of what it has been, thereby transposing our studies of behavioral differences to the much more revealing molecular level. DNA messages extracted from, say, many hundreds of psychopaths can then be compared to equivalent numbers of DNA messages from individuals prevented by their consciences from habitually lying, stealing, or killing. Specific DNA sequences consistently occurring only in psychopaths will allow us to pinpoint the genes likely malfunctioning to produce psychopathy. The thought that some people might be born to grow up wicked is inherently upsetting. But if we find such behavior to be innate, the integrity of science, no less than that of ethics, demands that we let the truth be known.

The relative extents to which genetic factors determine human intellectual abilities will also soon become much better known. At the etiological heart of much of schizophrenia and autism are learning defects resulting from the failure of key brain cells to link up properly to each other. As we find the human genes whose malfunctioning gives rise to such devastating developmental failures, we may well discover that sequence differences within many of them also lead to much of the observable variation in human IQs. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our desire to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Rather than face up to facts that will likely change the way we look at ourselves, many persons of good will may see only harm in our looking too closely at individual genetic essences. So I was not surprised when Derek, who had spent most of our meeting listening, asked apprehensively how many years would pass before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of "15 years" meant that Summers' then undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato.

Upon returning to the Yard, however, I wondered if even 10 years would pass.

    --James D. Watson (1928- ) in Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science