The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?
JAMES CLERK MAXWELLWhat’s the go of that? What’s the particular go of that?
More James Clerk Maxwell Quotes
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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.
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 -
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 -
In 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.
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 -
Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men’s hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression ‘structureless germs’.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
When I reappear it will be in the dusky ring, which is something like the state of the air supposing the siege of Sebastopol conducted from a forest of guns 100 miles one way, and 30,000 miles the other, and the shot never to stop, but go spinning away round a circle, radius 170,000 miles.
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 -
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 -
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.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL -
But I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonize his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself, and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society.
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 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 -
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 -
All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL