"Work life balance is great, in fact we recommend it to all of our competitors" @ayushjaiswal
"The only way to make a robot anything more than an adding machine is to provide him with a philosophy." Waddington (Tools for Thought)
"The essential function of a philosophy is to provide mental machinery for dealing with a large variety of things." Waddington (Tools for Thought)
"No conceptualization of a living system is adequate unless it includes at least four importantly different time scales, those of metabolism, development, heredity and evolution." - Waddington (Towards a Theoretical Biology, 1968)
"Biologists, however, while gratified to be told that physicists admit that biology offers problems which actually need thinking about, still remain doubtful whether physicists have realized just how challenging these problems really are." Waddington (Towards a Theoretical Biology, 1968)
"To define fitness as the ability to leave offspring in the next generation, in an environment treated as static if not uniform, is both unrealistic and so limiting as to be intellectually boring. [...] Evolution is really about the ability to cope with futures which cannot be entirely known but may not be wholly unforecastable." Waddington (Towards a Theoretical Biology, 1968)
"Theorists in general science have staked out claims for a variety of fields in this area -- games theory, decision theory, systems theory, and the like. It is not clear to the biologists wrestling with actual situations that many of these "disciplines" amount to anything more than the formulation of a lot of problems for which no solutions can be provided; there seems to be a singular dearth of actually proved theorems which the biologists can take over and employ." Waddington (Towards a Theoretical Biology, 1968)
"Unless you have a general, coarse grained theory to model the general case, then modeling the exception becomes... doing biology." Geoffrey West (AARD 2025)
Aging is a physical inevitability, manifested chemically, and mitigated biologically. Elena Sergeeva (AARD 2025)
Models are useful fictions. There is a space of comprehensive and understandable. You want to be on the Pareto front. Uri Alon (AARD 2025)
"There is an infinite number of incorrect theories correctly explaining the finite number of experimental data." Niels Bohr
"Facts are stupid things, until brought into connection with some general law." L. Agassiz
"When you’ve written the same code 3 times, write a function. When you’ve given the same in-person advice 3 times, write a blog post." D. Robinson
"Seek simplicity, but distrust it." A. N. Whitehead
"These are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas; they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures." K. Popper
"The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art." J. Bronowski
"Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it." S. Muhkergee
"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in." I. Asimov
"The outcome of the peer review process is a random variable whose mean is determined by the quality of the paper and whose variance is determined by the quality of the referees." Author Unknown
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." S. Begley
"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." von Neumann, on complicated math models
"PhD students tend to choose a lab based on the topic, but a creative and supportive environment is more important. If everyone in the lab is miserable, you will probably be miserable there too; and if they are happy and thriving, you'll also likely feel good about yourself there." Itai Yanai
"Evolution forms the first principles of all cancer biology." Bob Gatenby
"Cancer doesn't invent anything. All the key features have a normal equivalent that is either manifested out of context or starts normally but doesn't end." Irina Kareva
"This model will be a simplification and an idealization, and consequently a falsification. It is to be hoped that the features retained for discussion are those of greatest importance in the present state of knowledge." Alan Turing, on the purpose of the math model in his seminal paper about "The chemical basis of morphogenesis"
"I read the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything." S. Wright
"A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns." G. H. Hardy
"When you see a good move, look for a better one" Emanuel Lasker (mathematician & world chess champion)
"When you see mate in 1, look for better" Aman Hambleton (Chess GrandMaster)
"Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical." Neil DeGrasse Tyson
"Think of the body as a self-maintaining factory; it is constantly regenerating itself down to every cell." David B. Agus, The End of Illness
"There is no grantsmanship that will turn a bad idea into a good one, but there are many ways to disguise a good one." William Raub, former deputy director NIH
"Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well." Nassim Taleb
In a letter to the journal Science in 1972, Szent-Györgyi said that scientists could be divided into two classes, Dionysians and Apollonians - in science, the Apollonian tends to develop established lines to their limit, while the Dionysian relies on intuition and is more likely to open new, unexpected lines of research.
"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick." Susan Sontag
"Question everything generally thought to be obvious." Dieter Rams
The "=" notation was invented by Robert Recorde (1510-1558). He chose two parallel lines "because noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle."
"What’s the difference between theory and practice? Small in theory; large in practice…" Author Unknown
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." Albert Einstein
"The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple." Albert Einstein
"The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it." Naval Ravikant
"Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art." Richard Feynman
"The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth." Richard Feynman
"And yet, old friend, books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when we are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive." Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place
"It’s not about the predictive accuracy of the model that matters it’s the trust in the model." Ibrahim Chamsedine
"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." Max Planck
"The pioneer scientist must have "a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination." Max Planck
"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve." Max Planck
"In performing experiments, it is necessary... that they be simplified as much as possible, and that every circumstance that could complicate the results should be completely removed." Antoine Lavoisier
"The book of nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty, and symmetry, little by little, as it gradually comes to be more and more unfolded, or displayed." Boyle
"Nobody thinks until he has a problem." John Dewey