Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you any more.

                                                                                                Arnold Sommerfeld

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

                                                                                                Seth Lloyd (in the August 26, 2004 issue of Nature, v. 430)

"Engineering is a noble sport . . . but occasional blundering is a part of the game. Let it be your ambition to be the first

one to discover and announce your blunders. . . . Once you begin to feel tempted to deny your blunders in the face of

reasonable evidence you have ceased to be a good sport. You are already a crank or a grouch."

Karl Terzaghi from Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist by Richard E. Goodman

"An engineer? I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint. "

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

"As with the tone-deaf, they don't know what they miss. They give a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their own specialization is just as startling. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? 

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had. "

                                                                                                C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field."

Niels Bohr

"What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to obviate failure, and thus it is critical to identify exactly how a structure may fail. The computer cannot do this by itself . . ." 

                                                                                                Henri Petroski, To Engineer Is Human

". . . a failed structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows us incontrovertibly what cannot be done, while a structure that stands without incident often conceals whatever lessons or caveats it might hold for the next generation of engineers." 

                                                                                                Henri Petroski, To Engineer Is Human

"The burden of the lecture is just to emphasize the fact that it is impossible to explain honestly the beauty of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case. "

                                                                                                Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

"In mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them."

                                                                                                J. von Neumann