{"id":564,"date":"2009-06-06T23:34:45","date_gmt":"2009-06-07T03:34:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=564"},"modified":"2009-06-06T23:34:45","modified_gmt":"2009-06-07T03:34:45","slug":"quotation-of-the-day-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=564","title":{"rendered":"Quotation of the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

An English English professor — I mean an Englishman who is also a professor of English — mocks the hard sciences to a mathematician:<\/p>\n

\n

A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars — big bangs, black holes — who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?<\/p>\n

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I’d push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I’d lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Tom Stoppard, Arcadia<\/em>, Scene 5)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An English English professor — I mean an Englishman who is also a professor of English — mocks the hard sciences to a mathematician: A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-science","category-what-ive-been-watching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":565,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions\/565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}