No Highway in the Sky (1951)

Jack Hawkins: Dennis Scott

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Quotes 

• Elspeth Honey : it's very hard being a scientist. One has to think a great deal. The world would have made scarcely any progress at all if it hadn't been for scientists.

  Dennis Scott : I see. The scientists do the thinking for the world, and the rest of us just live in it, is that it?

  Elspeth Honey : Yes.

• Dennis Scott : What other games do you play?

  Elspeth Honey : Oh well there's pyramidology.

  Dennis Scott : Pyramid-?

  Elspeth Honey : Ology.

  Dennis Scott : Pyramidology.

  Elspeth Honey : That's the science of the Great Pyramid. My father made it up too, the game I mean, here it is, excuse me. It was built in the year 3,234 B.C., it's very scientific, it was built in direct relationship to the stars, so it has an astronomical significance. It's the only known architectural example of squaring the circle. That is the area of the base is directly equal to that of a circle, but the height of the structure of its radius. It has the most wonderful maximal.

• Elspeth Honey : When my father's thinking, I keep very quiet.

  Dennis Scott : What about your mother? Does she help you keep quiet?

  Elspeth Honey : My mother is dead, Mr. Scott, the V-2 in the war.

• Dennis Scott : [picks up The Bringing Up of the Child]  One of the more difficult sciences I imagine.

  Theodore Honey : What's that? Oh, oh yes. You know I didn't find that very satisfactory. They seem to have much different problems with their children than I've ever had with Elspeth.

• Penworthy, Test Pilot : Listen Scotty, pilots and desks, dogs and cats, natural enemies. We've got a theme song, you can laugh, pilot's error. Whenever anything goes wrong with their calculations and there's a smash up, pilot's error. Rosie. You remember Harry Ward?

  Dennis Scott : Yes I do.

  Penworthy, Test Pilot : Well look at what they did to him. He was piloting that Reindeer when it flew into the hill at Labrador a couple of months ago. All in little pieces, nothing to go on. Pilot dead, so pilot's error.

  Dennis Scott : You don't think it was pilot's error.

  Penworthy, Test Pilot : With Harry Ward, Scott? You can't be serious. They said he was dropping off altitude in an overcast. He wouldn't do a crazy thing like that, he'd be tried. Rosie, if you can tear yourself away from the salt mines for a couple of minutes, we would like a couple of wodkas.

• Theodore Honey : Oh, I'm afraid all I can offer you is some Sherry.

  Dennis Scott : Oh, that'd be very nice.

  Theodore Honey : Oh. Probably not very good. I've had it quite a while.

  Dennis Scott : Well, perhaps it's time we tested it to see if it's suffering from fatigue.

  Theodore Honey : Oh, that wouldn't happen to Sherry.

• Dennis Scott : What are you doing to it?

  Theodore Honey : I'm vibrating it.

• Dennis Scott : I was quite interested in that experiment of yours, with the Reindeer tail group. Would you like to tell me just what your idea is?

  Theodore Honey : Well, it's rather difficult to explain a thing like that in words of one syllable.

  Dennis Scott : Well, I have managed as much as two syllables on occasion, Mr. Honey.

  Theodore Honey : Well, to put it as simply as I can, the purpose of my work has been to arrive at an end result for the original theoretical hypotheses of Kerslinger, of Bâle and Schilgarde of Uppsala, in which they postulate vibration as a source of energy. I reasoned that since this energy does not appear in any of the ordinary forms, such as heat or electrical potential, it must be absorbed by the metal itself. And that sufficient absorption would result in nuclear fission of the aluminum atom in an isotopic form with crystalline affinities.

  Dennis Scott : I see. And that means the tail will fall off.

  Theodore Honey : Exactly.

• Theodore Honey : I'm afraid it's become a little cluttered in here. Oh, well why didn't I see that? I think I'd better leave this. This is some correspondence I've been having with Tanggye, a Tibetan, and the Abbe Delville in Louvain. It's on the theory of numbers. In 1742, Goldbach postulated that every positive, even integer is a sum of two primes. It's been verified to 10,000, but never proved. We're trying to prove it. Yes, I'd want to know where to find that.

  Dennis Scott : By all means. It sounds interesting, but isn't it a little pointless?

  Theodore Honey : Well, quite. That's the beauty of it.

• Penworthy, Test Pilot : What is your job, Scotty?

  Dennis Scott : Head of Metallurgy.

  Penworthy, Test Pilot : Don't tell me you're polishing your pants. Don't tell me you're one of those crawling little desk blokes.