I encountered this quotation afterward, which reassured me that feeling dead in the water for months at a time happens to the very very best of us.
I can illustrate the ... approach with the ... image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months — when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!
C. McLarty, The Rising Sea: Grothendieck on simplicity and generality, in J. J. Gray and K.H. Parshall eds., Episodes in the History of Modern Algebra (1800–1950), Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2007.
Yeah the funding necessary for large scale gravitational wave research wouldn't have been forthcoming unless everybody had been convinced GR was the best description available for decades.
Einstein predicted gravity waves but didn't expect we'd ever have the technology to measure them.
One of my Dutch coworkers always brought in chocolates. He said that once at Philips he played one of Pieter's countrymen for the company event (yes in full makeup).
The relativistic model was demonstrated to better describe the transit of Venus than Newtonian mechanics. It had been quickly proposed as a good test, was generally accepted as the crucial experiment, and all of this happened very fast.
When Top Gear chained the thing down to go through a cycle of the tides in the fucking North Atlantic and their mechanics could restart the thing on the fucking beach...
I read and loved Freefall, and specifically Florence. After I caught up, I went to read what other people had to say, and I saw a comment like "must-read if you're a furry!"
At first I was like "psh, that's not a furry comic". But about an hour later the dominoes started to fall for me.
I don't get it