
“A baby is lots more fun than differential equations.”
Source: Podkayne of Mars (1963), Chapter 10 (p. 127)
Epigram to Robin Gandy (1954); reprinted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage edition 1992), p. 513.
“A baby is lots more fun than differential equations.”
Source: Podkayne of Mars (1963), Chapter 10 (p. 127)
“Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes — not yet, anyhow.”
Rawdon, the aircraft designer, to Morris, his aspiring protege.
Stephen Morris, ch. 3, p. 41 (1923, published posthumously in 1961)
Vorlesungen über Dynamik http://archive.org/details/cgjjacobisvorle00lottgoog [Lectures on Dynamics] (1842/3; publ. 1884).
Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 96, as cited in: Vincent Vesterby (2013) From Bertalanffy to Discipline-Independent-Transdisciplinarity http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings56th/article/viewFile/1886/672
Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)
Context: Even if without the Scott's proverbial thrift, the difficulty of solving differential equations is an incentive to using them parsimoniously. Happily here is a commodity of which a little may be made to go a long way.... the equation of small oscillations of a pendulum also holds for other vibrational phenomena. In investigating swinging pendulums we were, albeit unwittingly, also investigating vibrating tuning forks.<!--p.224
Source: The Physics Of Baseball (Second Edition - Revised), Chapter 2, The Flight Of The baseball, p. 22
Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 97
"The Quantum State of the Universe", Nuclear Physics (1984) <!-- B239, p. 258 -->
Context: Many people would claim that the boundary conditions are not part of physics but belong to metaphysics or religion. They would claim that nature had complete freedom to start the universe off any way it wanted. That may be so, but it could also have made it evolve in a completely arbitrary and random manner. Yet all the evidence is that it evolves in a regular way according to certain laws. It would therefore seem reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the boundary conditions.