History of science

"The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus."

"We are indeed a blind race, and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours."

"Understanding what M-theory really is—the physics it embodies—would transform our understanding of nature at least as radically as occurred in any of the major scientific upheavals of the past."

"This statement appears to us to be conclusive with respect to the insufficiency of the undulatory theory, in its present state, for explaining all the phenomena of light. But we are not therefore by any means persuaded of the perfect sufficiency of the projectile system: and all the satisfaction that we have derived from an attentive consideration of the accumulated evidence, which has been brought forward, within the last ten years, on both sides of the question, is that of being convinced that much more evidence is still wanting before it can be positively decided. In the progress of scientific investigation, we must frequently travel by rugged paths, and through valleys as well as over mountains. Doubt must necessarily succeed often to apparent certainty, and must again give place to a certainty of a higher order; such is the imperfection of our faculties, that the descent from conviction to hesitation is not uncommonly as salutary, as the more agreeable elevation from uncertainty to demonstration. An example of such alternations may easily be adduced from the history of chemistry. How universally had phlogiston once expelled the aërial acid of Hooke and Mayow. How much more completely had phlogiston given way to oxygen! And how much have some of our best chemists been lately inclined to restore the same phlogiston to its lost honours! although now again they are beginning to apprehend that they have already done too much in its favour. In the mean time, the true science of chemistry, as the most positive dogmatist will not hesitate to allow, has been very rapidly advancing towards ultimate perfection."

"Notwithstanding the broad foundation for mechanics laid by Newton in his Principia, and notwithstanding the indefatigable labors of Clairaut, d'Alembert, the Bernoullis, and Euler, there was near the end of the eighteenth century no comprehensive treatise on the science. Its leading principles and methods were fairly well known, but scattered through many works, and presented from divers points of view. It remained for Lagrange to unite them into one harmonious system. Mechanics had not yet freed itself from the restrictions of geometry, though progress since Newton's time had been constantly toward analytical... methods. The emancipation came with Lagrange's Mécanique Analytique published one hundred and one years after the Principia."

"The history of the rainbow from the age of myth to contemporary optics is an example wrought in miniature of our unfolding penetration of and relation to natural phenomena. ...Yet while engaging in itself, the history of the rainbow hides within it another story far more significant than an external history of science. For the changing images of the rainbow reflect to us momentous changes in the fabric of consciousness itself. The history of light, the rainbow, and more generally the history of science continue to act as a text in which we read the psychogenesis of the mind."