Clifford Pickover Quotes

#1. Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the scientific geniuses who formerly owned them? I'll never look at a pigeon, a pearl, or a Wheatstone bridge the same way again.

Mark Frauenfelder

#2. I say to everybody, 'Adoption is not for the faint of heart.'

Mariska Hargitay

#3. If they wanted to slap my photo onto cereal boxes? Perfect. Leotards? Makes sense. Tampons? Sure, I'd go with the flow. (Ha.)

R.S. Grey

#4. There is something that happens when you get emancipated. You approach life differently. You eat differently. You respect yourself more. You respect the gift you have been given.

Prince

#5. I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core.

Clifford A. Pickover

#6. There can never be a clock at the center of the Universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life can be the blink of an eye to an alien who leaves Earth traveling close to the speed of light, then returns an hour later to find that you have been dead for centuries.

Clifford A. Pickover

#7. Preservations are working to save neon signs for future generations, either on-site or in museums. After all, what would America be without a few giant doughnuts around.

Clifford A. Pickover

#8. Without these supernova explosions, there are no mist-covered swamps, computer chips, trilobites, Mozart or the tears of a little girl. Without exploding stars, perhaps there could be a heaven, but there is certainly no Earth.

Clifford A. Pickover

#9. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has proved that if two black holes unite, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the surface areas of the initial black holes. For these reasons the total black-hole portion of the universe is ever increasing.

Clifford A. Pickover

#10. For those of you who are about to embark on reading The Math Book from cover to cover, look for the connections, gaze in awe at the evolution of ideas, and sail on the shoreless sea of imagination.

Clifford A. Pickover

#11. As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls

Clifford A. Pickover

#12. At his "World of Physics" Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!

Clifford A. Pickover

#13. Neutronium is so dense that a chunk the size of a thimble would weigh about 100 million tons.

Clifford A. Pickover

#14. If information is true, if it can be verified, and if it's really important, the newspaper needs to be willing to take the risk associated with using unidentified sources.

Bob Woodward

#15. This three-dimensional froth even produces tunnels and wormlike tubes commonly depicted in embedding diagrams for quantum froth. The connecting bridges in the foam correspond to wormholes between different universes or between different places in the same universe.

Clifford A. Pickover

#16. The hand of Vengeance found the Bed To which the Purple Tyrant fled The iron hand crush'd the tyrant's head And became Tyrant in his stead.

William Blake

#17. Men of authority have employed all the destructive agents around them to promote their own personal interests at the sacrifice of every just, honorable, and lawful consideration.

John White Geary

#18. Often, simply knowing the answer is the largest hurdle to overcome when formulating a proof.

Clifford A. Pickover

#19. The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.

Clifford A. Pickover

#20. Einstein created an unstoppable "intellectual chain reaction," an avalanche of pulsing, chattering neurons and memes that will ring for an eternity

Clifford A. Pickover

#21. I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland.
Her voice smelled like an orange,
though I'd never peeled an orange.
I knocked on the walls, in a circle.

Yusef Komunyakaa

#22. Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored.

Clifford A. Pickover

#23. In retrospect, I think it's a plus, because now we've been able to go back and spend extra time on each of those episodes and make them better.

David E. Kelley

#24. Perceiving your own voice means perceiving your true self or nature. When you and the sound become one, you don't hear the sound; you are the sound.

Seung Sahn

#25. I set very high standards for myself and worked every game with the same energy and enthusiasm as if it were the seventh game of a World Series.

Jim Evans

#26. What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.

Robert Fitzgerald

#27. Oppression has no logic
just a self-fulfilling prophecy, justified by a self-perpetuating system.

Gloria Steinem