Quotes about analogue (27 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“It is well known that in three-dimensional elliptic or spherical geometry the so-called Clifford's parallelism or parataxy has many interesting properties. A group-theoretical reason for the most important of these properties is the fact that the universal covering group of the proper orthogonal group in four variables is the direct product of the universal covering groups of two proper orthogonal groups in three variables. This last-mentioned property has no analogue for orthogonal groups in n (>4) variables. On the other hand, a knowledge of three-dimensional elliptic or spherical geometry is useful for the study of orientable Riemannian manifols of four dimensions, because their tangent spaces possess a geometry of this kind.”

Shiing-Shen Chern (1911–2004) mathematician (1911–2004), born in China and later acquiring U.S. citizenship; made fundamental contributio…

[On Riemannian manifolds of four dimensions, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 51, 12, 1945, 964–971, http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1945-51-12/S0002-9904-1945-08483-3/S0002-9904-1945-08483-3.pdf]

Knowledge , Study , Universe

“In many cases a dull proof can be supplemented by a geometric analogue so simple and beautiful that the truth of a theorem is almost seen at a glance.”

Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher

"Mathematical Games", in Scientific American (October 1973); also quoted in Roger B. Nelson, Proofs Without Words: Exercises in Visual Thinking (1993), "Introduction", p. v

Truth , Beauty

“Let it be remarked … that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

V. Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 121.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Way , Nature , Success , Past

“Consideration of a further possibility, namely that of constructing physical systems that are analogues of the economic system, and of observing and recording their behaviour.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. vi

“I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 14

People , World , Fear , Thinking

“It is possible that the major collaboration between economists and engineers is still to come, in the greater use of physical analogues and computers of the analogue type to avoid the difficulties of calculation. Apart from their major use as possible tools for economic regulation, physical analogues have a subsidiary use, for there are students of economics, as there are many students of engineering, who can better understand the significance of the somewhat formidable mathematics that tends to be used in this field, if they can first acquaint themselves with the types of behaviour in question as exhibited by physical objects that can be seen, felt, handled and experimented with. It may also be suggested that economists may find that what they have to say about economic policy will be very readily assimilated by one group of attentive pupils, namely the scientists, engineers and technicians of industry, if explanatory notions can be drawn from the theory of automatic control, which is now part of a normal engineering education. The aim of this essay has been to give explanations of system behaviour, and some approaches to its analysis, using geometrical construction and physical analogy where possible to clarify the implications of the more usual formal algebraic approach.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 2

Education , Mathematics , Understanding , Question

“No one, to my knowledge, has suggested that the image must accelerate and decelerate or that the relation among torque, angular momentum, and angular velocity has a,1 analogue in the mental rotation case. Of course it may tum our that it takes subjects longer to rotate an object that they imagine to be heavier, thus increasing the predictive value of the metaphor. But in that case it seems clearer that, even if it was predictive, the metaphor could nor be explanatory (surely, no one believes that some images are heavier than others and the heavier ones accelerate more slowly).”

Zenon Pylyshyn (1937) Canadian philosopher

Zenon W. Pylyshyn, "The rate of “mental rotation” of images: A test of a holistic analogue hypothesis." Memory & Cognition 7.1 (1979): 19-28; p. 19-20

Imagination , Knowledge

“The British arrived with no intention of conquest: the East India Company had set up trading posts on the western seaboard, and its officers were called on by the native sultans to help with the putting down of rapacious river barons. The parallel with India is exact, and Stamford Raffles is a perfect analogue of Robert Clive. First came trade, then the amateur protective army, finally the flag….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Help , Perfection

“Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. the idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/lkbak10.txt (1888), Ch. 1.

Imagination , History , Idea , Nature

“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 176

Nature , Parent

“Euclidean geometry can be easily visualized; this is the argument adduced for the unique position of Euclidean geometry in mathematics. It has been argued that mathematics is not only a science of implications but that it has to establish preference for one particular axiomatic system. Whereas physics bases this choice on observation and experimentation, i. e., on applicability to reality, mathematics bases it on visualization, the analogue to perception in a theoretical science. Accordingly, mathematicians may work with the non-Euclidean geometries, but in contrast to Euclidean geometry, which is said to be "intuitively understood," these systems consist of nothing but "logical relations" or "artificial manifolds". They belong to the field of analytic geometry, the study of manifolds and equations between variables, but not to geometry in the real sense which has a visual significance.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Mathematics , Reality , Sense , Study

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

Women , Men , Art , Music

“Evolution is an obstacle course not a freeway; the correct analogue for long-term success is a distant punt receiver evading legions of would-be tacklers in an oddly zigzagged path toward a goal, not a horse thundering down the flat.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Tires to Sandals", p. 318
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Distant , Success , Horse

“Since it can be argued that both science and engineering are concerned with the study of real systems and their behavior, it follows that a general theory should be concerned with the study of general systems… It suffices for the present discussion to consider a general system as an abstract analogue or model of a class of real systems. General systems theory is then a theory of general models.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Mesarovic (1964) cited in: Shatrughna P. Sinha (1991) Instant encyclopaedia of geography. 1. Introduction to geography. Mittal Publications, p. 467

Behavior , Study , Science

“Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark's total restitution could appease.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 4
Suttree (1979)

Light

“Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was, in various books, explicitly written, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed all a available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 26 : "Epper Si Muove"

Books , Religion , Error , Nature

“Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.”

Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) American philosopher

Feeling and Form, ch. 1, p. 27, Scribner (1953)

Life , Music

“Where mass-mobilizing ‘revolutionary Marxists’ have come to power, and remained in power sufficiently long to create a viable political system, what they have generally succeeded in creating is a reasonable analogue of the Fascist state.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, (1974), p. 134

“The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst—for me, at least—is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.”

Stephen King book Nightmares & Dreamscapes

Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993), Introduction

Books , Fear , Faith , Way

“In [the early 1980s], making electronic music was a big job, particularly the way that I was doing it. To get the sounds I wanted, I might have 24 synthesizers playing one synth line, all programmed, all analogue and all drifting out of tune. It used to take hours and hours and hours. I don't know how we ever got through it.”

Martin Rushent (1948–2011) English record producer

The Telegraph, Martin Rushent, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/technology-obituaries/8562220/Martin-Rushent.html, The Telegraph, 7 June 2011

Music , Way

“According to Marx, the evolution of capitalism would inevitably lead to the pauperization of the proletariat and then, just as inevitably, to its radicalization. It is interesting that Bento Mussolini arrived at an identical judgment ten years later. Before the outbreak of the first World War, Mussolini had been the closest analogue to Lenin in the European socialist movement, being equally revolutionary and anti-reformist. He was the Lenin of the Italian Socialist Party with the difference that, whereas Mussolini managed to rally behind him a revolutionary majority and expel the reformers, in Russia, Lenin found himself leading a minority and forced to break away from the Social-Democratic Establishment.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), pp. 36-37

War , World

“Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell's artistic aims, it is not easy to escape the fact that in Figures of Earth he undertook the staggering and almost unsuspected task of rewriting humanity's sacred books, just as in Jurgen he gave us a stupendous analogue of the ceaseless quest for beauty. For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabell is not a novelist at all in the common acceptance of the term, but a historian of the human soul.”

Burton Rascoe (1892–1957) American writer

Introduction to Chivalry (1921) by James Branch Cabell, later published in Prometheans : Ancient and Modern (1933), p. 279
Context: Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell's artistic aims, it is not easy to escape the fact that in Figures of Earth he undertook the staggering and almost unsuspected task of rewriting humanity's sacred books, just as in Jurgen he gave us a stupendous analogue of the ceaseless quest for beauty. For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabell is not a novelist at all in the common acceptance of the term, but a historian of the human soul. His books are neither documentary nor representational; his characters are symbols of human desires and motives. By the not at all simple process of recording faithfully the projections of his rich and varied imagination, he has written thirteen books, which he accurately terms biography, wherein is the bitter-sweet truth about human life.

Truth , Books , Beauty , Soul

“The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28
Context: Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.

Communication

“Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency.”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

"Brave New Biocracy: Health Care from Womb to Tomb" NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 11, Issue 1 (Winter 1994) http://brandon.multics.org/library/Ivan%20Illich/against_life.html.
Context: Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.

“The machine is supplied with a "tape" (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called "squares") each capable of bearing a "symbol."”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“It is known that very distant nebulae, probably galactic systems like our own, show remarkably high receding velocities whose magnitude increases with the distance. This curious phenomenon promises to provide some important clues for the future development of our cosmological views. It maybe of advantage, therefore, to point out some of the principal facts which any cosmological theory will have to account for. Then a brief discussion will be given of different theoretical suggestions related to the above effect. Finally, a new effect of masses upon light will be suggested which is a sort of gravitational analogue of the Compton effect.”

Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974) Swiss astronomer

Source: Fritz Zwicky, [On the redshift of spectral lines through interstellar space, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 15, 10, 1929, 773–779, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC522555/] (quote from p. 773)

Light , Distant , Future

“Mountain climbing is an analogue of the research process in theoretical physics. In working on a problem in physics one is never assured of a solution, because there are many false leads and pitfalls. Likewise in climbing there is no certainty of attaining the summit; the route is often unknown, or sometimes one attains a false summit. But the important point is that if you reach the top, the view is enormous. There is no comparison between what you see from just below the summit and what you can see from the top. Similarly with finally solving an important problem in physics the view you get is enormous.”

Heinz R. Pagels (1939–1988) American physicist

Source: The Cosmic Code (1982), p. 272

Mountain , Falseness , Problem