If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi. Richard Preston More Quotes by Richard Preston More Quotes From Richard Preston In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. Richard Preston simple life thinking You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish. Richard Preston ebola fighting years What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love. Richard Preston motivation inspiration thinking To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax. Richard Preston ebola easy way Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance. (p. 12) Richard Preston circles tree moving It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty. Richard Preston obscenity extremes kind The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference. Richard Preston circles character order Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outsiders who appear. (94) Richard Preston cutting practice people Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194) Richard Preston viruses cells fall When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying. Richard Preston viruses dying people During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish. Richard Preston shining school moving The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite. Richard Preston infection parasites earth The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it. Richard Preston best-way soup way Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous. Richard Preston monkeys suits space He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. Richard Preston space loneliness world The dragonfly is an exceptionally beautiful insect and a fierce carnivore. It has four wings that beat independently. This gives it an ability to maneuver in the air with superb dexterity. A dragonfly can put on a burst of speed, stop on a dime, hover, fly backward, and switch direction in a flash. This is a hunting behavior known as hawking. Richard Preston fly fierce wings beautiful When you get up into the crown of a redwood tree, you lose sight of the ground entirely. You also lose sight of the sky. And you're in a lost world. You're in an undiscovered, unexplored ecosystem, somewhere between Heaven and Earth, filled with forms of life, not all of which have been given names by scientists yet. Richard Preston you sky tree life No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time. Richard Preston time tree life history An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree. Richard Preston feet hair tree long Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators. Richard Preston new like life people
