Randall Munroe Quotes

Mathematicians always like a deceptively difficult problem.

Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

Guys are natural problem solvers - they like to have strategies.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.

Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

When a company is facing a problem, it always takes a stance and takes a decision, but at the same time it wants to make sure of what it can learn from it, what enhancements it can make.

I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.

One of the biggest and most important tools of theoretical physics is the wastebasket.

I could imagine actually being a scientist or a detective, but not a detective who puts his hands into gory, bloody things. But more like someone who figures things out. I like to figure things out.

I think I have the special ability to process information quickly and dissect defenses.

I like thinking and being able to answer questions that are tough to answer. You have to try to figure out how to get a good answer and look intelligent.

I see myself as a problem solver, creating solutions.

Mathematicians have a certain type of mind, and climbers have a certain type of mind, because climbing poses these incredibly interesting problems for them.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.

A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.

I did a lot of thinking, and used mental activity to relieve whatever feelings I had. I became very left-brained, and I was good in school. That is, I was a smart kid.