I have been battering away at Saturn, returning to the charge every now and then. I have effected several breaches in the solid ring, and now I am splash into the fluid one, amid a clash of symbols truly astounding.
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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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,
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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…
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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.
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Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men’s hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression ‘structureless germs’.
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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.
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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.
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Wherein they fancy intersperses Long avenues of universes, While Klein and Clifford fill the void With one finite, unbounded homoloid, And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed.
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Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
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The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretations, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten.
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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.
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Heat may be generated and destroyed by certain processes, and this shows that heat is not a substance.
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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.
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I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.
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The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.
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The vast interplanetary and vast interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of space or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL