Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
Speaking of Science. Notable Quotes on Science, Engineering, and the Environment by Jon Fripp, Michael Fripp, and Deborah Fripp LLH Technology Publishing: Eagle Rock, VA, 2000. 240 pp. ISBN 1-878707-51-5. $14.95. reviewed by Ronald M. Magid
Who among us doesn’t enjoy quotations? They serve all sorts of purposes: they can inspire and they can depress; they can clarify and they can muddle; but best of all they can be used as zingers to impress one’s friends and to confound one’s enemies. Jon and Michael Fripp are engineers; Deborah Fripp is a marine biologist. What they have done is to compile a large number of quotations (they don’t offer the number and I’m certainly not going to count) and have divided them into chapters that relate to the experimental sciences, mathematics, engineering, the environment, the teaching of science, and the environment of the workplace. The authors chosen by the Fripps range from the great (Newton, Einstein, Galileo) to the near-great and, ultimately, to the not-so-great (Homer Simpson, Milton Berle, Mickey Mouse). Notables from outside of science include political figures (Churchill, Jefferson, Hitler), literary artists (Goethe, Shakespeare, Joseph Heller), philosophers (Aristotle, Wittgenstein), inventors (Bell, Edison), and so on. At the risk of being “frippant” I do think that acknowledging the help of five more Fripps and then actually quoting the words of three others (Michael and Archie Jr. and Sr.) borders on the incestuous. Mercifully missing from this collection are the much-too-frequently quoted Yogi Berra, Casey Stengel, and Mae West. The absence of bon mots from Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) from the chapter on the workplace is
edited by
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
inexplicable and probably inexcusable. I, too, am a collector of quotations, which I place at the top of exams and in memos to campus colleagues. Although I have collected (or stolen) mine over a period of some 40 years from a variety of sources, I was surprised to see that the Fripps and I have very few in common. One of my favorite sources was Lewis Thomas (1913–1993), worldrenowned biochemist, immunologist, medical administrator, and author of several essential books of popular essays. Although the Fripps cite him 12 times and I have 10 of his sayings in my own collection, we have but two duplicates. The book seems to be relatively free of typographical errors. Two that I found are a page reference to Lewis Thomas that should have been 188 (not 288) and an incorrect page reference (181) to Milton Berle for which I can’t find the correct one. Should you buy this book? Well, why not! It’s not something that one is going to read from cover to cover, but it is nice to have it handy for those times when a quotation is needed. For example, if your Department Head schedules a meeting that interferes with your plans to play golf, dismiss him or her with Freeman Dyson’s “We have been suffering from a surfeit of committees. Committees do harm merely by existing”; or if a future M.D. in your undergraduate course complains about a grade, use this riposte (but don’t forget to duck!) from Lewis Thomas “The influence of the modern medical school on liberal arts education in this country over the last decade has been baleful and malign, nothing less.” Both of these, by the way, come from my own collection, not from the one under review. Maybe I, too, should compile a book of quotations? Ronald Magid is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996;
[email protected]. utk.edu.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 77 No. 12 December 2000 • Journal of Chemical Education
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