13. Werner Heisenberg
via guff.com
“When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”
You know who usually isn’t funny? German scientists who were born in 1901 and spent their lives dealing with aspects of physics that most of us can’t even pronounce. Heisenberg, considered the father of quantum mechanics, won the Nobel Prize in 1932. The reference to turbulence may seem out of left field, but the scientist wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject and later revisited the phenomenon in papers written in 1948 and 1950.
12. Dominique Bouhours
via wikipedia.org
“I am about to, or I am going to, die; either expression is correct.”
Grammar geeks of the world rejoice as you have found your patron saint. The author of (say it all together now) ‘Doutes sur la langue française proposés aux Messieurs de l’Académie française’ really shouldn’t have been expected to say anything less. That hard-to-pronounce book was considered the most important and thorough examination of language at the time. One of the sections of his book was a criticism of several famous phrases of the time, picking them apart the way some of your friends like to point out when you use “there” but you should have used “their” in your Facebook posts. He must have known his last words would be immortalized and he didn’t want to leave it up for debate.
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