Diameter Quotes

But although the attractive virtue of the earth extends upwards, as has been said, so very far, yet if any stone should be at a distance great enough to become sensible compared with the earth's diameter, it is true that on the motion of the earth such a stone would not follow altogether; its own force of resistance would be combined with the attractive force of the earth, and thus it would extricate itself in some degree from the motion of the earth. (Johannes Kepler)
Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.... Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
Translates to: Add four to 100, multiply by eight, and then add 62,000. By this rule the circumference of a circle with a diameter of 20,000 can be approached. Thus according to the rule ((4 + 100) × 8 + 62000)/20000 = 62832/20000 = 3.1416, which is accurate to five significant figures. View quote
Aryabhata
Have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count three? Do you know the number of God's family? Can you put mysteries into words? Do you presume to fable of the ineffable? Pray, what geographer are you, that speak of heaven's topography? Whose friend are you that speak of God's personality? ... Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad. View quote
Henry David Thoreau
The number of stands I invented for these telescopes it would not be easy to assign. ...In 1781 I began to construct a thirty foot aërial reflector, and having made a stand for it, I cast the mirror thirty-six inches in diameter. This was cracked in cooling. I cast it a second time, and the furnace I had built in my house broke. View quote
William Herschel
She's Prim's size in diameter. View quote
Suzanne Collins
Then, too, the columns at the corners should be made thicker than the others by a fiftieth of their own diameter, because they are sharply outlined by the unobstructed air around them, and seem to the beholder more slender than they are. View quote
Vitruvius
I was almost driven to madness in considering and calculating this matter. I could not find out why the planet would rather go on an elliptical orbit. Oh, ridiculous me! As the liberation in the diameter could not also be the way to the ellipse. So this notion brought me up short, that the ellipse exists because of the liberation. With reasoning derived from physical principles, agreeing with experience, there is no figure left for the orbit of the planet but a perfect ellipse. View quote
Johannes Kepler
Proposition 13. The straight line subtending the portion intercepted within the earth's shadow of the circumference of the circle in which the extremities of the diameter of the circle dividing the dark and the bright portions in the moon move is less than double of the diameter of the moon, but has to it a ratio greater than that which 88 has to 45; and it is less than 1/9th part of the diameter of the sun, but has to it a ratio greater than that which 22 has to 225. But it has to the straight line drawn from the centre of the sun at right angles to the axis and meeting the sides of the cone a ratio greater than that which 979 has to 10125. View quote
Aristarchus of Samos
We are now in a position to prove the following propositions : - 1. The distance of the sun from the earth is greater than eighteen times, but less than twenty times, the distance of the moon (from the earth); this follows from the hypothesis about the halved moon. 2. The diameter of the sun has the same ratio (as aforesaid) to the diameter of the moon. 3. The diameter of the sun has to the diameter of the earth a ratio greater than that which 19 has to 3, but less than that which 43 has to 6; this follows from the ratio thus discovered between the distances, the hypothesis about the shadow, and the hypothesis that the moon subtends one fifteenth part of a sign of the zodiac. View quote
Aristarchus of Samos
Proposition 9. The diameter of the sun is greater than 18 times, but less than 20 times, the diameter of the moon. (Aristarchus of Samos)
Proposition 12. The diameter of the circle which divides the dark and the bright portions in the moon is less than the diameter of the moon, but has to it a ratio greater than that which 89 has to 90. View quote
Aristarchus of Samos
Proposition 11. The diameter of the moon is less than 2/45ths, but greater than 1/30th of the distance of the centre of the moon from our eye. View quote
Aristarchus of Samos
Small bodies, about half a micron in diameter, and later referred to under the name of 'mitochondria' were detected under the light microscope as early as 1894. View quote
Albert Claude
There is a new way with very very tiny fiber optics, which give an enormous high resolution. There are many many thousand fibers, very very close together with a very small diameter. View quote
Lennart Nilsson
Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule. View quote
Paul McEuen
Many of their lodges remained as perfect as when occupied. They were made of poles two or three inches in diameter, set up in circular form, and covered with cedar bark. View quote
William Henry Ashley
Whoever participates in universal Knowledge will regard two apparently contradictory truths as he would two points situated on one and the same circumference that links them together by its continuity and so reduces them to unity; in the measure in which these points are distant from and thus opposed to one another there will be contradiction and this contradiction will reach its maximum when the two points are situated at the extremities of a diameter of the circle; but this extreme opposition or contradiction only appears as a result of isolating the points under consideration from the circle and ignoring the existence of the latter. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought not by the rising and setting of the sun. View quote
Henry Ward Beecher
Now, therefore, the Directors of the company are hereby ordered to see that precautions are taken to make travel on said railroad perfectly safe by using a screw with at least twenty-four inches diameter. View quote
Emperor Norton
[Doc Dubois] had been focusing all of his attention in the other direction, on Peach Pit and its iron-rich "children,” PP1, PP2, and PP3, nailing down their exact orbital parameters, taking high-res photographs. PP3 was especially interesting. It was a congealed glob of mostly iron, similar in composition to Amalthea. It was some fifty kilometers in diameter. And it had a deep cleft on one side, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, apparently formed by a collision that had rent its outer skin while it was partly congealed. Doob had begun calling PP3 Cleft. (Neal Stephenson)
Imagine the inside of St. Peter's in Rome filled with a huge quantity of fibers around a millimeter in diameter that crisscross the building in every direction creating a firm mat – then you have an idea of what the brain looks like when magnified a thousand times. View quote
Valentino Braitenberg
I was on par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
In course sand it may be better to drive a well. Driven wells are usually 2 inches in diameter and less than 30 feet deep. If driving conditions are good, you can drive a 4-inch casing as deep as 50 feet. A driving tool consists of a drive point connected to the lower end of sections or pipe. View quote
Ken Kern
Herschel's argument was... Since with such a telescope one can see a star ten times as far off as is possible to the naked eye, this telescope has the power of penetrating into space ten times farther than the eye alone. But this number ten, also, expresses the ratio of the diameter of the objective to that of the pupil of the eye, consequently the general law is that the space-penetrating power of a telescope is found by dividing the diameter of the mirror in inches by two-fifths. The diameter of the pupil of the eye (two fifths of an inch) Herschel determined by many measures. View quote
William Herschel