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 MAXWELLIn fact, whenever energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a medium or substance in which the energy exists after it leaves one body and before it reaches the other … and if we admit this medium as an hypothesis.
More James Clerk Maxwell Quotes
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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 -
Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
I think it ought to occupy a prominent place in our investigations, and that we ought to endeavour to construct a mental representation of all the details of its action, and this has been my constant aim in this treatise.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
Colour as perceived by us is a function of three independent variables at least three are I think sufficient, but time will show if I thrive.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
… that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
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I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
In the heavens we discover [stars] by their light, and by their light alone … the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds … that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds we find on earth.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
Thus number may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.
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The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds.
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We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.
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The popularisation of scientific doctrines is producing as great an alteration in the mental state of society as the material applications of science are effecting in its outward life.
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Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL