All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL
But, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds.
More James Clerk Maxwell Quotes
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All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
The experimental verification of the mathematical results therefore is no evidence for or against the peculiar doctrines of this theory.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
We define thermodynamics … as the investigation of the dynamical and thermal properties of bodies, deduced entirely from the first and second law of thermodynamics, without speculation as to the molecular constitution.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
The equations at which we arrive must be such that a person of any nation, by substituting the numerical values of the quantities as measured by his own national units, would obtain a true result.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
One of the chief peculiarities of this treatise is the doctrine that the true electric current, on which the electromagnetic phenomena depend, is not the same thing as the current of conduction, but that the time-variation of the electric displacement must [also] be taken into account.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
What’s the go of that? What’s the particular go of that?
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
But I should be very sorry if an interpretation founded on a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis…
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
My soul is an entangled knot, Upon a liquid vortex wrought By Intellect in the Unseen residing, And thine doth like a convict sit, With marline-spike untwisting it, Only to find its knottiness abiding; Since all the tools for its untying In four-dimensional space are lying,
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
But that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL