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[L]et me refer to my original work. Naturally, if a student has been hammering away ever since 1979... he must have accumulated a lot of litter, much… - Carl Barus
" "[L]et me refer to my original work. Naturally, if a student has been hammering away ever since 1979... he must have accumulated a lot of litter, much of which, perhaps, should have long since been swept away. But the fates are not to be bribed either by pother or importunity. Out of 1,000 men who are called, one (probably the ratio is much smaller) is chosen to do glorious scientific work. The others? Their lot is failure. They may be equally or even more industrious, they may have equal or even greater brain power—the other 999 exist merely to make the illustrious one in whom they culminate, possible. After that, the world will say to each in words of poetic brevity: "The man has done his duty, the man can go." And they do, pretty quickly, to a gentler lethe, flowing between the banks of amaranth and asphodel.
Gentlemen, I am one of the 999 about to be forgotten.
English
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About Carl Barus
(February 19, 1856 – September 20, 1935) was an American physicist and the maternal great-uncle of the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut. He was dean of the Brown University Graduate Department from 1903 until his retirement in 1926. In 1905 he became a corresponding member of Britain, a member of the First International Congress of Radiology and Electricity at Brussels, and a member of the Physical Society. Beginning in 1906 he was on the advisory board of physics at the Carnegie Institution in Washington state. He died in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A.
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Additional quotes by Carl Barus
[T]he rooms which had been placed at my disposal by the American Museum of New York became temporarily unavailable. ...[W]e determined to rent a house in New Haven, Conn., and thither the laboratory was removed in November, 1882. ...[T]he city offered excellent library and other facilities for scientific work, such as can be met only in the immediate vicinity of a large university [Yale College]. ...The work in New Haven was not satisfactorily completed. In July, 1883, with the appointment of Prof. F. W. Clarke as chief chemist of the Geological Survey, our laboratory was officially connected with the chemical laboratory. Conformably with the further decision of the Director, by which the divers laboratories of the Geological Survey were united in one central laboratory in Washington, it was again necessary to change our basis of operations, this time... from New Haven to Washington. In the quarters assigned to us in the U. S. National Museum, temperature work on so large a scale... appeared impracticable, and it was therefore abandoned. ...In place of the dangerous and cumbersome apparatus of the former laboratory, the endeavor is made to reduce all apparatus to the smallest dimensions compatible with reasonable accuracy of measurement.
I develop a method for the direct and expeditious comparison of the thermo-couple with the air thermometer. A comparison of the data... gives me a criterion of the accuracy with which the data in the region of high temperature are known. This indirect method... is not apparently as rigorous as their direct evaluation by means of the air thermometer; but the indirect method requires much smaller quantities of substance and may be conveniently extended to much higher temperatures. Taking all liabilities to error into consideration, its inferior accuracy is only apparent.
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