Academics From Germany

"Was in dem Herzen andrer von Uns lebt, Ist unser wahrestes und tiefstes Selbst."

"Sag' o Weiser, wodurch du zu solchem Wissen gelangtest? "Dadurch, daß ich mich nie andre zu fragen geschämt.""

"The Hindus are the gentlest branch of humanity. They do not with pleasure offend anything that lives; they honor that which gives life and nourish themselves with the most innocent of foods, milk, rice, the fruits of the trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses . . . Moderation and calm, a soft feeling and a silent depth of the soul characterize their work and their pleasure, their morals and mythology, their arts and even their endurance under the most extreme yoke of humanity."

"Jesus Christ is, in the noblest and most perfect sense, the realized ideal of humanity."

"Röntgen was an experimental physicist of the old school and built most of his own equipment. ...It was Rontgen's custom, when beginning new investigations, to repeat important experiments made previously by others in the same field. Since he was repeating Hertz' and Lenard's experiments with cathode rays, he used an armamentarium employed by those workers... he extended his experiments to include a Hittorf-Crookes' tube... when he discovered the new rays. The whole room was darkened... Röntgen suddenly saw a few brightly fluorescent crystals which lay on the table at some distance from the tube."

"Wir leben immer in einer Welt, die wir uns selbst bilden."

"For every ancient nation likes to consider itself the firstborn and to take its territory for humanity’s birthplace."

"Am sorgfältigsten, mein Freund, meiden Sie die Autorschaft darüber. Zu früh oder unmäßig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf wüste und das Herz leer, wenn sie auch sonst keine üblen Folgen gäbe. Ein Mensch, der die Bibel nur lieset, um sie zu erläutern, lieset sie wahrscheinlich übel, und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstößt, durch Feder und Presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und wird bald ein blosser Diener der Druckerey, ein Buchstabensetzer werden."

"With the regret of a traveler, obliged to leave a country before he learned to know it as he wished, I take leave of Asia. How little we know of it! What we do know comes from such late periods and from such dubious authorities! The eastern part of Asia has become known to us only recently through religious or political parties, and in the hands of scholars in Europe has become so confused in parts that we still see great stretches of it as a fairytale land. In the Near East and in neighboring Egypt everything from all periods appears to us as a ruin or a vanished dream; what we know from written sources we know only from the mouths of passing Greeks, who were partly too young and partly of too foreign a way of thinking to under- stand the deep antiquity of these states; they were only able to grasp what interested them. The archives of Babylon, Phoenicia, and Carthage are no more: Egypt was in its decline, almost before a single Greek visited its interior. Everything has been shrunk down to a few faded pages, containing fables of fables, fragments of history, a dream of the prehistorical world."

"The Bramins have formed their people to such a degree of gentleness, courtesy, temperance and chastity, or at least have so confirmed them in these virtues, that Europeans frequently appear, on comparison with them, as beastly, drunken or mad. In their air and language they are unconstrainedly elegant; in their behaviour, friendly; in their persons, clean; in their way of life, simple and harmless ... they are not destitute of knowledge, still less of quiet industry or nicely imitative art; even the lowest castes learn reading, writing and arithmetic. . . ."

"You see, my friend, how holy these books are to me, and how much I (according to Voltaire’s ridicule) am a Jew, when | read them: for should we not be Greeks and Romans, when we read [the works of] Greeks and Romans? Every book must be read in its own spirit, and so too the book of books, the Bible; and since this one contains, from the beginning to the end, the revealed spirit of God... we cannot do anything more perverse than to read God’s texts with the spirit of Satan, that is, to embellish the oldest wisdom by invoking the most recent stupidities, [or to explain) heavenly simplicity by means of today’s roguish witticisms."

"Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? ... No one is in his age alone, he builds on the preceding one, this becomes nothing but the foundation of the future, wants to be nothing but that — this is what we are told by the analogy in nature, God’s speaking exemplary model in all works! Manifestly so in the human species!"

"We shall see what we shall see. We have the start now; the developments will follow in time."

"Röntgen retained the characteristic of a strikingly modest and reticent man. Throughout his life he retained his love of nature and outdoor occupations. Many vacations were spent at his summer home at Weilheim, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, where he entertained his friends and went on many expeditions into the mountains. He was a great mountaineer and more than once got into dangerous situations. Amiable and courteous by nature, he was always understanding the views and difficulties of others. He was always shy of having an assistant, and preferred to work alone. Much of the apparatus he used was built by himself with great ingenuity and experimental skill."

"I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper. … The effect was one which could only be produced, in ordinary parlance, by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube, because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known, even that of the electric arc. … I did not think; I investigated. I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube, since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else. I tested it. In a few minutes there was no doubt about it. Rays were coming from the tube which had a luminescent effect upon the paper. I tried it successfully at greater and greater distances, even at two metres. It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new, something unrecorded."

"Röntgen has familiarized us with an order of vibrations of extreme minuteness compared with the smallest waves with which we have hitherto been acquainted, and of dimensions comparable with the distances between the centers of the atoms of which the material universe is built up; and there is no reason to suppose that we have here reached the limit of frequency."

"Having discovered the existence of a new kind of rays, I of course began to investigate what they would do. … It soon appeared from tests that the rays had penetrative power to a degree hitherto unknown. They penetrated paper, wood, and cloth with ease; and the thickness of the substance made no perceptible difference, within reasonable limits. … The rays passed through all the metals tested, with a facility varying, roughly speaking, with the density of the metal. These phenomena I have discussed carefully in my report to the Würzburg society, and you will find all the technical results therein stated."

"In his later work, in particular, he voices considerable animus against British colonization in India; in his 1803 preface to a new edition of Forster’s Sakuntala, he says that “English rhyme schemes suit Indian poetry as searing-hot water acts on the sweet blooms of the Mallika, which singe and destroy them (as the English do the Hindus themselves),” and deplores the fact that “‘this cultural and spiritual treasure of the most peace-loving nation of our earth” has been entrusted to ‘the most commerce-driven nation of the globe.”’ In an essay of 1802 entitled ‘“Conversations about the Conversion of the Indians by Our European Christians” he is even more vehemently critical. The non-European asks hard questions of the European: now that Europe has “subjugated, robbed, plundered, and murdered” the Indians, do they want to convert them? “If someone came to your land and explained your holy of holies, laws, religion, wisdom, state organization, etc. in an arrogant manner, with the most vulgar person in mind as an audience, how would you greet him?” The European weakly responds: ‘‘This case is different. We have power, ships, wealth, cannons, culture.”"4® Similarly, Herder rages against Jesuit attempts to convert the Chinese, which have resulted, reports, in the persecution of perhaps as many as 300,000 Chinese Christians. “And for how many banishments, imprisonments and beatings of converted mandarins are the foreign proselytizers guilty! And why do the converted suffer? For foreign words and customs.’’"

"Der Appetit nach einer schönen Frucht ist angenehmer als die Frucht selbst."

"The lesson of the laboratory was eloquent. Compared, for instance, with the elaborate, expensive, and complete apparatus of, say, the University of London, or any of the great American Universities, it was bare and unassuming to a degree. It mutely said that in the great march of science it is the genius of the man, and not the perfection of the appliances, that breaks new territory in the great territory of the unknown. ...the discoverer himself had done so much with so little."

"Die zwei größten Tyrannen der Erde, der Zufall und die Zeit."

"I am not a prophet, and I am opposed to prophesying. I am pursuing my investigations, and as fast as my results are verified I shall make them public."

"Calmly take what ill betideth; Patience wins the crown at length: Rich repayment him abideth Who endures in quiet strength. Brave the tamer of the lion; Brave whom conquered kingdoms praise; Bravest he who rules his passions, Who his own impatience sways."

"His papers and lectures... form one of the enduring monuments in physical science."

"His contributions extend over optics, heat, fluid, motion, electricity, elasticity, etc., and all bear the imprint of the great genius..."

"In 1875 he accepted... the chair of at Berlin where he became associated with his former colleague von Helmholtz."

"By 1845 he had investigated electric currents, and established the two so-called Kirchhoff's laws for current conduction."

"In 1854 he... became associated with Bunsen. ...[H]e ...for twenty years ...in connection with Bunsen achieved some of the most important discoveries in the history of physical science."

"The proof of this special law is similar to that of the general law, but simpler; it will therefore facilitate the understanding of the latter. Moreover, conclusions which are drawn from the special law will be used in the proof of the common law."

"Another result of this law... When a space is surrounded by bodies of the same temperature, and no rays can penetrate through these bodies, every pencil in the interior of the space is so constituted, with respect to its quality and intensity, as if it proceeded from a perfectly black body of the same temperature, and is therefore independent of the nature and form of the bodies, and only determined by the temperature. The truth... is evident if we consider that a pencil of rays, which has the same form, but the reverse direction to that chosen, is completely absorbed by the infinite number of reflections which it successively experiences at the assumed bodies. In the interior of an opaque glowing hollow body of given temperature there is, consequently, always the same brightness whatever its nature may be in other respects."

"Why do you want to come into physics? All is done and understood."

"This law will be proven, first, for the case where only black bodies are compared with each other, that is, those whose absorptic power = 1; i.e., it will be shown that the radiating power of all black bodies is the same at the same temperature."

"The quantity E is called the emissive power of the body."

"Conversely, upon the body there falls through the openings 2 and 1 a pencil of rays having the wave length \lambda, polarized in the plane a; of this, the body absorbs a part while it reflects or transmits the remainder; let the ratio of the intensity of the absorbed rays to the incident rays be A and let this be called the absorptive power of the body... The quantities E and A depend upon the nature of the condition of the body.., also upon the form and position of the openings.., the wave length \lambda and the direction of the plane a."

"We owe to Kirchhoff..., the first rigorous proof of the celebrated law (...Kirchhoff's law) of the emission and absorption of light and heat, and the application of the same by both Kirchhoff and Bunsen to Spectrum Analysis. The radiation of solids and liquids and gases follows the law exactly when the conditions upon which he founded it are rigorously fulfilled, namely, the complete transformation from one to the other of radiant energy and their intrinsic ."

"Under these conditions the following law holds : The ratio between the emissive and the absorptive power is the same for all bodies at the same temperature."

"A perfect mirror, like every diathermanous body, can itself send out no rays; for if it did (confined in an enclosure of like temperature) it would warm this enclosure... and cool itself more and more."

"Before a body... imagine two screens, S1 and S2 placed in which are two openings 1 and 2, whose dimensions are infinitely small with respect to their distance apart, and each of which has a center."

"[R]adiation in empty space will be investigated..⇒ the [associated] black bodies must have a refracted index which differs infinitely little from 1."

"[I]t will be assumed that perfectly diathermanous bodies are conceivable, that is, such which will absorb none of the incident heat rays of whatever nature these may be, and finally, that a perfect mirror is conceivable, i.e., a body which reflects completely all heat rays."

"Through these openings passes a pencil of rays sent out by the body... consider the part [of the pencil], whose lies between \lambda and \lambda + \partial \lambda, and let this be divided into two polarized components, whose planes of polarization are the [perpendicular] planes a and b... passing through the axis of the ray pencil."

"Let E \partial \lambda be the intensity of the component polarized in a, or... [equivalently] the increase, which the vis viva of the ether beyond the screen S2 experiences through this component in the unit of time."

"[M]ost radiations from gases are not exclusively thermal... [T]he substances, cited by Kirchhoff and Bunsen, also give off... chemical.., electrical and fluorescent radiations which Kirchhoff excluded in the proof of his law."

"A '... must have the same as the medium... then there will be no reflection at its surface, and all incident rays... wholly absorbed."

"Through the radiations... a body sends out, the quantity of ... it contains will... sustain a loss... equivalent to the ' of those rays, and through the heat rays... it absorbs, a gain... equivalent to the vis viva of the absorbed rays."

"[I]n certain cases an exception to this rule may occur... [when] absorption and the radiation produce other changes in the body.., for example in bodies... chemically changed by light... [etc.]"

"Such cases should be excluded on the assumption that neither by means of the rays which it radiates or absorbs, nor by... other influences... does the body... change, if its is kept constant by the addition or the subtraction of heat. Under these conditions... the... heat... transferred to a body in a given time to prevent cooling... in consequence of its radiation, is equivalent to the vis viva of the emitted rays; and the amount of heat... withdrawn... to counterbalance the heating from absorption of radiations, is equivalent to the vis viva of the absorbed rays."

"Of the heat rays... sent... to a body by its surroundings a part are absorbed, the others are... varied by reflection and . The rays refracted and reflected... pass off... with those sent out by it, without... mutual disturbance..."

"Look here, I have succeeded at last in fetching some gold from the sun."

"Heat rays have the same nature as light rays... The invisible heat rays are distinguished from light rays only by the period of or the wave length."