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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index S > Category: Shock

Shock Quotes (5 quotes)

“Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright.
“In vain!&rsdquo; cried Ahab; “but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead. ...”
[Commentary by Henry Schlesinger: Electricity—mysterious and powerful as it seemed at the time—served as a perfect metaphor for Captain Ahab's primal obsession and madness, which he transmits through the crew as if through an electrical circuit in Moby-Dick.]
— Herman Melville
Extract from Herman Melville, Moby-Dick and comment by Henry Schlesinger in The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution (2010), 64.
Science quotes on:  |  Accumulation (12)  |  Circuit (10)  |  Death (168)  |  Electricity (69)  |  Leyden Jar (2)  |  Madness (11)  |  Metaphor (7)  |  Obsession (3)

As physicists have arranged an extensive series of effects under the general term of Heat, so they have named another series Light, and a third they have called Electricity. We find ... that all these principles are capable of being produced through the medium of living bodies, for nearly all animals have the power of evolving heat; many insects, moreover, can voluntarily emit light; and the property of producing electricity is well evinced in the terrible shock of the electric eel, as well as in that of some other creatures. We are indeed in the habit of talking of the Electric fluid, or the Galvanic fluid, but this in reality is nothing but a licence of expression suitable to our finite and material notions.
— Alfred Smee
In the Third Edition of Elements of Electro-Metallurgy: or The Art of Working in Metals by the Galvanic Fluid (1851), 1.
Science quotes on:  |  Animal (123)  |  Creature (43)  |  Effect (56)  |  Electricity (69)  |  Expression (35)  |  Finding (17)  |  Habit (31)  |  Heat (46)  |  Insect (35)  |  Light (99)  |  Nothing (64)  |  Notion (10)  |  Physicist (61)  |  Principle (87)  |  Production (59)  |  Reality (57)  |  Terrible (3)

That small word “Force,” they make a barber's block,
Ready to put on
Meanings most strange and various, fit to shock
Pupils of Newton....
The phrases of last century in this
Linger to play tricks—
Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:—
Those long-nebbed words that to our text books still
Cling by their titles,
And from them creep, as entozoa will,
Into our vitals.
But see! Tait writes in lucid symbols clear
One small equation;
And Force becomes of Energy a mere
Space-variation.
— James Clerk Maxwell
'Report on Tait's Lecture on Force:— B.A., 1876', reproduced in Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (2001), 19. Maxwell's verse was inspired by a paper delivered at the British Association (B.A.. He was satirizing a “considerable cofusion of nomenclature” at the time, and supported his friend Tait's desire to establish a redefinition of energy on a thermnodynamic basis.
Science quotes on:  |  Barber (3)  |  Block (5)  |  Clarity (20)  |  Clinging (2)  |  Creeping (2)  |  Energy (89)  |  Equation (40)  |  Force (60)  |  Lucidity (2)  |  Meaning (46)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (161)  |  Nomenclature (93)  |  Phrase (6)  |  Play (14)  |  Poem (73)  |  Pupil (9)  |  Space (54)  |  Strange (11)  |  Symbol (21)  |  Peter Guthrie Tait (5)  |  Textbook (11)  |  Title (3)  |  Trick (8)  |  Variation (30)  |  Various (6)  |  Vital (7)  |  Word (89)

The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870), 552.
Science quotes on:  |  Astronomy (98)  |  Chemistry (133)  |  Elbow (2)  |  Electricity (69)  |  Experiment (346)  |  Lesson (12)  |  Nitrous Oxide (2)  |  Planet (69)  |  Science (754)  |  Spark (8)  |  Telescope (38)  |  Theory (319)  |  Volcano (22)  |  Worth (16)

When I entered the field of space physics in 1956, I recall that I fell in with the crowd believing, for example, that electric fields could not exist in the highly conducting plasma of space. It was three years later that I was shamed by S. Chandrasekhar into investigating Alfvén's work objectively. My degree of shock and surprise in finding Alfvén right and his critics wrong can hardly be described. I learned that a cosmic ray acceleration mechanism basically identical to the famous mechanism suggested by Fermi in 1949 had [previously] been put forth by Alfvén.
— Alex Dessler
Quoted in Anthony L. Peratt, 'Dean of the Plasma Dissidents', Washington Times, supplement: The World and I (May 1988), 195.
Science quotes on:  |  Belief (116)  |  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (4)  |  Confirm (2)  |  Cosmic Ray (5)  |  Critic (7)  |  Crowd (4)  |  Description (34)  |  Enter (5)  |  Enrico Fermi (10)  |  Investigate (3)  |  Plasma (6)  |  Recall (3)  |  Right (37)  |  Shame (4)  |  Space (54)  |  Surprise (17)  |  Wrong (32)



Carl Sagan Thumbnail At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan

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