
“The analogy he is looking for is almost there. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.”
Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
while explaining crystal structure to college students, as quoted in Ping-Pong makes physics come alive http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat=19890319&id=wgMPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=P4QDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4397,1638268, The Deseret News (March 19, 1989)
“The analogy he is looking for is almost there. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.”
Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
[Beata Randrianantoanina, Narcisse Randrianantoanina, Banach Spaces and Their Applications in Analysis: Proceedings of the International Conference at Miami University, May 22-27, 2006, in Honor of Nigel Kalton's 60th Birthday, http://books.google.com/books?id=1GiwqU-gB_kC&pg=PR5, 2007, Walter de Gruyter, 978-3-11-019449-4, 5]
Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 454.
Context: Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "sub-critical," i. e., to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are super-critical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?"
“A patent is a legal analog of sticky fly paper: it attracts some of the lowest forms of life.”
in his autobiography, as quoted by [Peter Louis Galison, Bruce William Hevly, Big science: the growth of large-scale research, Stanford University Press, 1992, 0804718792, 55]
1910s, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)
Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 149
“Life is too complicated to use analogies to describe it.”
Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)
Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 69
Context: There is really nothing more pathetic than to have an economist or a retired engineer try to force analogies between the concepts of physics and the concepts of economics. How many dreary papers have I had to referee in which the author is looking for something that corresponds to entropy or to one or another form of energy. Nonsensical laws, such as the law of conservation of purchasing power, represent spurious social science imitations of the important physical law of the conservation of energy; and when an economist makes reference to a Heisenberg Principle of indeterminacy in the social world, at best this must be regarded as a figure of speech or a play on words, rather than a valid application of the relations of quantum mechanics.
Book I, Chapter 2, p. 65-66
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)