A Quote by Magnus Pyke

If it squirms, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics; and if you can't understand it, it's mathematics.

Magnus Pyke

Quote Topics

Biology Chemistry Mathematics Physics Stinks Understand Work

Quote Author

Magnus Pyke
English - Scientist
December 29, 1908 - October 19, 1992

Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.

Israel Gelfand

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

Stephen Hawking

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

Francis Crick

And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.

Michael Polanyi

The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology.

Paul Davies

Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.

George Polya

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.

Michael Crichton

Well, I was always... I used to get 100% in physics and chemistry and mathematics (well, maybe a couple of points off in mathematics), and that was in high school.

James Doohan

I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well.

Francis Collins

Geology differs from physics, chemistry, and biology in that the possibilities for experiment are limited.

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.

Francis Collins

Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

Primo Levi

Studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry is worshipping God.

Fethullah Gulen

I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would - I would say that it's probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it's mostly chemistry.

Wylie Dufresne

It seems that every practitioner of physics has had to wonder at some point why mathematics and physics have come to be so closely entwined. Opinions vary on the answer. ..Bertrand Russell acknowledged..'Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little.' ..Mathematics may be indispensable to physics, but it obviously does not constitute physics.