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Simon Singh QUOTES

Simon Singh QUOTES

1 " All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable. "

― Simon Singh , Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe

2 " Perhaps the greatest danger in the way that alternative therapists behave is simply the promotion of their own treatments when patients should be in the care of a conventional doctor. There are numerous reports of patients with serious conditions (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS) suffering harm after following irresponsible advice form alternative practitioners instead of following the advice of a doctor. "

― Simon Singh , Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine

3 " (Florence) Nightingale's passion for statistics enabled her to persuade the government of the importance of a whole series of health reforms. for example, many people had argued that training nurses was a waste of time, because patients cared for by trained nurses actually had a higher mortality rate than those treated by untrained staff. Nightingale, however, pointed out that this was only because more serious cases were being sent to those wards with trained nurses. If the intention is to compare the results from two groups, then it is essential to assign patients randomly to the two groups. Sure enough, when Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts in wards with untrained nurses. "

― Simon Singh , Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine

4 " God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it. "

― Simon Singh , Fermat's Enigma

5 " Previous experience, however, tells us that every so-called unbreakable cipher has, sooner or later, succumbed to cryptanalysis "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

6 " Quantum cryptography would mark the end of the battle between codemakers and codebreakers, the codemakers emerging victorious, because quantum cryptography is a truly unbreakable system of encryption. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

7 " An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. “How interesting,” observed the astronomer, “all Scottish sheep are black!” To which the physicist responded, “No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!” The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, “In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black. "

― Simon Singh , The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

8 " Similarly, if you’re trying to prove something mathematically, it’s possible that no proof exists. "

― Simon Singh , The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

9 " Pascal was even convinced that he could use his theories to justify a belief in God. He stated that ‘the excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win multiplied by the probability of winning it’. He then argued that the possible prize of eternal happiness has an infinite value and that the probability of entering heaven by leading a virtuous life, no matter how small, is certainly finite. Therefore, according to Pascal’s definition, religion was a game of infinite excitement and one worth playing, because multiplying an infinite prize by a finite probability results in infinity. "

― Simon Singh , Fermat's Enigma

10 " A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. "

― Simon Singh , The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

11 " The first known European book to describe the use of cryptography was written in the thirteenth century by the English Franciscan monk and polymath Roger Bacon. Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic included seven methods for keeping messages secret, and cautioned: “A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

12 " if N is large enough, it is virtually impossible to deduce p and q from N, and this is perhaps the most beautiful and elegant aspect of the RSA asymmetric cipher. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

13 " Ron Rivest, one of the inventors of RSA, thinks that restricting cryptography would be foolhardy: It is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminately on a technology just because some criminals might be able to use it to their advantage. For example, any U.S. citizen can freely buy a pair of gloves, even though a burglar might use them to ransack a house without leaving fingerprints. Cryptography is a data-protection technology, just as gloves are a hand-protection technology. Cryptography protects data from hackers, corporate spies, and con artists, whereas gloves protect hands from cuts, scrapes, heat, cold, and infection. The former can frustrate FBI wiretapping, and the latter can thwart FBI fingerprint analysis. Cryptography and gloves are both dirt-cheap and widely available. In fact, you can download good cryptographic software from the Internet for less than the price of a good pair of gloves. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

14 " Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

15 " The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

16 " like Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, the Navajo were ignored for decades. Eventually, in 1968, the Navajo code was declassified, and the following year the code talkers held their first reunion. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

17 " if a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed, "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

18 " The nineteenth-century mathematician Leopold Kronecker said, “God made the integers; all the rest is the work of man. "

― Simon Singh , Fermat's Enigma

19 " Enigma was considered invulnerable, until the Poles revealed its weaknesses. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

20 " This apparently innocuous observation would lead to the first great breakthrough in cryptanalysis. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography