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 MAXWELLThe 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.
More James Clerk Maxwell Quotes
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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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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.
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Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
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I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.
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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.
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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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All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.
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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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An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL







