“Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships.”

— Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 8, Los Alamos, p. 148

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one c…" by Stanislaw Ulam?

Stanislaw Ulam 33

Polish-American mathematician 1909–1984

Related quotes

“Sometimes one can improve the theories in the sense of discovering a quicker, more efficient way of doing a given calculation.”

John Pople (1925–2004) Nobel prize winning British chemist

describing his discoveries in Density functional theory, December 29, 1995, in an interview with [István Hargittai, Magdolna Hargittai, Candid science: conversations with famous chemists, Volume 1 of Candid science, Imperial College Press, 2000, 1860942288, 180]

“We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

Source: Love and Friendship (1993), p. 15.

“You get older and you learn there is one sentence just four worlds long and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this… Ready ”
“Ready.”
“At least I tried.”

Ann Brashares book Sisterhood Everlasting

Source: Sisterhood Everlasting

“How well a posse policy will fare in a world with 3 billion people below the poverty line and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine.”

Herbert Schiller (1919–2000) American media critic

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 70

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)
Context: Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.

“Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903), p. 414

“One honest relationship can be more productive than fistfuls of business cards.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

"Revenge of the introverts: It's often assumed extroverts do best in life, but a new book reveals quite the opposite... ," The Daily Mail, March 25, 2012.

“She found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.”

Octavia E. Butler book Dawn

Part IV “The Training Floor” chapter 9 (p. 242)
Dawn (1987)

“There is one term of the problem which you are not taking into account: precisely, the world. The real. You say: the real, the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change... It is more mobile than you can imagine. You are getting closer to this reality when you say as it 'presents itself'; that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote in 'John Cage, For the Birds: John Cage In Conversation with Daniel Charles', London/New York: Marion Boyars, 1981; as quoted in: 'Tàpies: From Within', June ─ November, 2013 - Presse Release, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC ), p. 17, note 10
1980s

“Everything is simpler than one can imagine, at the same time more involved than can be comprehended.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Alles ist einfacher, als man denken kann, zugleich verschränkter, als zu begreifen ist.
Maxim 1209, trans. Stopp
Variant translation: Everything is simpler than we can imagine, at the same time more complex and intertwined than can be comprehended.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

“Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Stanislaw Ulam 33

Related quotes

Related topics