I have looked into most philosophical systems and I have seen that none will work without God.
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 true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.
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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’.
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 -
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.
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All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.
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But though the professed aim of all scientific work is to unravel the secrets of nature, it has another effect, not less valuable, on the mind of the worker. It leaves him in possession of methods which nothing but scientific work could have led him to invent.
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.
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Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
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… 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.
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.
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 -
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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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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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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Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL