32 quotes found
"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
"There cannot be a greater mistake than that of looking superciliously upon the practical applications of science. The life and soul of science is its practical application; and just as the great advances in mathematics have been made through the desire of discovering the solution of problems which were of a highly practical kind in mathematical science, so in physical science many of the greatest advances that have been made from the beginning of the world to the present time have been made in earnest desire to turn the knowledge of the properties of matter to some purpose useful to mankind."
"Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way."
"I am afraid I am not in the flight for “aerial navigation”. I was greatly interested in your work with kites; but I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. So you will understand that I would not care to be a member of the aëronautical Society."
"Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but 'vector' is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature."
"Mathematics is the only true metaphysics."
"Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense."
"I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of sound speculation in dynamical science."
"It is conceivable that animal life might have the attribute of using the heat of surrounding matter, at its natural temperature, as a source of energy for mechanical effect . . . .The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific enquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms."
"Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time."
"To live among friends is the primary essential of happiness."
"Every boy... should be able by the age of 12 to write his own language with accuracy and some elegance; he should have a reading knowledge of French, and be able to translate Latin and easy Greek authors, and have some acquaintance with German. Having learned thus the meaning of words... a boy should study Logic, so as to be able to apply his words sensibly."
"Now I think hydrodynamics is to be the root of all physical science, and is at present second to none in the beauty of its mathematics."
"It is impossible by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects. [Footnote: ] If this axiom be denied for all temperatures, it would have to be admitted that a self-acting machine might be set to work and produce mechanical effect by cooling the sea or earth, with no limit but the total loss of heat from the earth and sea, or in reality, from the whole material world."
"1. There is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissipation of mechanical energy. 2. Any restoration of mechanical energy, without more than an equivalent of dissipation, is impossible in inanimate material processes, and is probably never effected by means of organized matter, either endowed with vegetable life or subjected to the will of an animated creature. 3. Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject."
"If the water flow down by a gradual natural channel, its potential energy is gradually converted into heat by fluid friction, according to an admirable discovery made by Mr Joule of Manchester above twelve years ago, which has led to the greatest reform that physical science has experienced since the days of Newton. From that discovery, it may be concluded with certainty that heat is not matter, but some kind of motion among the particles of matter; a conclusion established, it is true, by Sir Humphrey Davy and Count Rumford at the end of last century, but ignored by even the highest scientific men during a period of more than forty years."
"The beauty and clearness of the dynamical theory, which asserts heat and light to be modes of motion, is at present obscured by two clouds. I. The first came into existence with the undulatory theory of light, and was dealt with by Fresnel and Dr. Thomas Young; it involved the question, how could the earth move through an elastic solid, such as essentially is the luminiferous ether? II. The second is the Maxwell–Boltzmann doctrine regarding the partition of energy."
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
"He was one of the few scientists to be knighted, and the only one in the nineteenth century to be raised to the peerage. These honors, however, were not in recognition of his scientific work but his genius as an engineer in solving the major technical problems of laying the first Atlantic cable and his entrepreneurial success as an instrument designer and manufacturer for the new electrical industries and the Navy. With his success with the Atlantic cable Kelvin became a symbol of science to the general public."
"The man of true Physical instincts, endowed with the great faculty of scientific imagination, possessed for example by Lord Kelvin in a very remarkable degree, is for ever imagining models which shall enable him by their working to represent and depict the course of actual physical processes. The possibility and consistency of such models require Mathematical Analysis for their investigation."
"According to Sir W. Thomson's theory of Vortex Atoms, the substance of which the molecule consists is a uniformly dense plenum, the properties of which are those of a perfect fluid, the molecule itself being nothing but a certain motion impressed on a portion of this fluid, and this motion is shewn, by a theorem due to Helmholtz, to be as indestructible as we believe a portion of matter to be."
"If materialism cannot consistently escape the conclusion of a finite state, which William Thomson has traced out for it, then materialism is thereby refuted."
"Thomson was a mathematical prodigy. At age 16, he mastered ’s ' and wrote and published a defense of it. Fourier’s theory allowed one to determine the distribution of heat in a body on the sole assumption that heat flow is proportional to temperature gradient. The approach was macroscopic, geometrical, and nonhypothetical, and Thomson took to it easily. During his undergraduate years at , he traveled to Paris and met the mathematical savants—in particular, mathematician Joseph Liouville and experimental physicist , who both considered Michael Faraday’s curved lines of force outré. At Liouville’s urging, Thomson produced for the ' a demonstration that the lines of force, whether electric or magnetic, followed from inverse square laws. The relevant mathematics was a near cousin to that for heat flow, but the insight was new and would be seminal in the thinking that led James Clerk Maxwell to electromagnetic field theory."
"Why is there something rather than nothing? Why, in particular, does the universe exist? Where did it come from and where, if anywhere, is it heading? Is it itself the ultimate reality behind which there is nothing or is there something 'beyond' it? Can we ask with Richard Feynman: 'What is the meaning of it all?" Or was Bertrand Russell right when he said that 'The universe is just there, and that's all'?"
"... energy, light, gravity, and consciousness ... You believe in these things because of their explanatory power as concepts. ... God is not a monolith ... God is Himself a fellowship ..."
"I think atheism undermines science very seriously because if you think of the basic assumption that all of us who are scientists have, that is, we believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe. And, it's interesting to me that scientists of the eminence of Eugene Wigner and Albert Einstein used the word “faith.” They cannot imagine a scientist without this faith because, of course, they point out that you've got to believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe before you can do any science at all. Science doesn't give you that."
"It was belief in God that motivated the advance of science in the 16th and 17th centuries. Gallelo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton expected to find law in nature because they believed in a great law giver. Now so often we hear the new atheists talk about faith, depricating it. I want to tell you that scientists are all people of faith. As Einstein saw, they believe that the universe is accessable to the human mind and physics can not explain that for the simple reason that you can't do physics without believing that the universe is intelligable. So science required faith."
"All people are people of Faith. Everybody's got a world view that they believe and this really exposed one of the biggest problems we have in our culture -- that Christians are regarded as people of faith. That means they believe where there's no evidence but atheists -- they're not people of Faith, they're rational and fighting against that is one of the things I've been doing for a long time."
"There's a very interesting statement that Paul made that the God of this world has blinded the minds of those who don't believe that there is an enemy who sets the thought forms of the world and Paul analyzes the intellectual darkness that comes about in Romans when people reject God they end up worshiping stones and inanimate things. They ascribe creatorial power to Nature because they don't believe in God and some of it is utterly absurd; and yet that is what happens and I would describe it as intellectual Darkness, but there's an enemy behind it."
"The evils perpetuated by some professing branches of the Christian church have died hard."
"Take the whole of the Bible, how much of it was written at a time when there was no persecution and trouble? Very little and we have had an experience in Europe, at least until relatively recently, without war for an unusual period of time and unfortunately into the vacuum there has poured all this kind of stuff postmodernism, atheism, all the rest of it."
"I have a reason for trusting my mind at least in part because it is ultimately the product of the vast intelligence of a personal God as is the Universe out there; and that's why the two match together."