Frances Donald

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 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: Chaos will Reign.

• 31.69 nHz = once a year.
• A bristlecone pine is just a fire's way of making another fire.
• A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
• A red sign on the door of a physics professor: 'If this sign is blue, you're going too fast.'
• A vibration is a motion that can't make up its mind which way it wants to go.
• Actually officer, if you factor in the earth's rotation, we were all speeding.
• All that glitters has a high refractive index.
• As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. - Einstein
• Barium: What you do with dead chemists.
• Be careful with water -- it's full of hydrogen and oxygen!
• Biology grows on you.
• Black holes suck.
• Color... it's just a pigment of your imagination.
• Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics because of this element of chance and uncertainty. He said: God does not play dice. It seems that Einstein was doubly wrong. The quantum effects of black holes suggests that not only does God play dice, He sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
  
  — Steven Hawking
• Entropy - it's a tough job, but somebody's got to undo it.
• Entropy isn't what it used to be.
• Entropy: Not just a fad, it's the future!
• Geologists rock your world.
• Geology: Subduction leads to Orogeny.
• Gravity isn't MY fault--I voted for velcro!
• Gravity... not just a good idea: It's the law.
• If it doesn't work, it's physics.
• If it's 0 degrees today, and it's going to be twice as cold tomorrow...how cold will it be?
• If it's green or it wiggles, it's biology.
• If it stinks, it's chemistry.
• "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
  
  — Thomas Alva Edison
• I like angles, but only to a degree.
• If the Earth is the size of a pea in New York, then the Sun is a beachball 50m away, Pluto is 4km away, and the next nearest star is in Tokyo. Now shrink Pluto's orbit into a coffee cup, then our Milky Way Galaxy fills North America.
• If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
• In The Beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
• It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy.
• Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak...
• May the torque be about you.
• Nature abhors a vacuum. So does my sister's dog.
• Particle physicists are always trying to hold a meeting, but whenever they decide on a place, the time changes.
• Photons have mass!? I didn't even know they were Catholic...
• "Push to test." (click) "Release to detonate."
• Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of.
• Resolving a transformation is like cleaning a barn - it's hard to get started, but when you're good and dirty, you might as well keep going.
• Scientists have discovered that time is not real, that we only live in the current moment. But then according to that, they haven't done the research, and don't have anything to back them up.
• Scientists have shown that the moon is moving away at a tiny yet measurable distance from the earth every year. If you do the math, you can calculate that 85 million years ago the moon was orbiting the earth at a distance of about 35 feet from the earth's surface. This would explain the death of the dinosaurs. The tallest ones, anyway.
• Snackmosphere: The 95% air inside a bag of chips.
• That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder. - Calvin (& Hobbes)
• The Benoit/Blamey Theory of Thermo-Sock-Dynamics: Why bother to do laundry, when the inevitable loss of a sock will just increase entropy and contribute to the eventual heat death of the universe anyway?
• The law of gravity says, "no fair jumping without coming down"
• The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."' - Isaac Asimov
• There is no gravity. Earth sucks!
• The square root of three equals two for large values of three. - found in a bathroom in the Cornell Physics department
• The Three Laws Of Thermodynamics First Law: You can't win. Second Law: You can't break even. Third Law: You can't even get out of the game.
• "Today, everybody remembers Galileo. How many can name the bishops and professors who refused to look through his telescope?"
  
  — James Hogan, Mind Matters
• To most people solutions mean finding the answers but to chemists solutions are things that are still all mixed up...
• Water is composed of two gins, Oxygin and Hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin. Hydrogin is gin and water.
• What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.
  
  — Dave Barry
• When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat. The two will hover, spinning inches above the ground. With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.
• When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions.