19th-century Physicist Quotes

The forerunners in the march of science do not often come heralded by much ceremony suggestive of the power that lies behind them. Often in apparent trivialities do they reveal themselves — trivialities so void of spectacular content that but few can be found who deem it worth while to listen to their story.

William Francis Gray Swann

It is not easy to be sure whether the crucial idea is really one's own or has been unconsciously assimilated in talks with others.

William Lawrence Bragg

Most scientists have little enthusiasm for history. The job of the scientist is to make discoveries and develop new ideas. When new ideas prove effective they tend to make old ones obsolete: thus it is not altogether unfair to say that the typical scientist is in the business of creating the future and destroying the past.

Edwin C. Kemble

From the point of view of the physicist, a theory of matter is a policy rather than a creed; its object is to connect or co-ordinate apparently diverse phenomena, and above all to suggest, stimulate and direct experiment. It ought to furnish a compass which, if followed, will lead to observer further and further into previously unexplored regions.

The careful experiments of Joule, who developed heat in various ways by the application of mechanical force, establish almost to a certainty, not only the possibility of increasing the quantity of heat, but also the fact that the newly-produced heat is proportional to the work expended in its production.

Rudolf Clausius

The face of Nature as presented to us is infinitely varied, but to those who love her it is ever beautiful and interesting.

A mathematician will recognize Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, of Helmholz after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognize, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert.

Ludwig Boltzmann

I am much puzzled by some recent results as to the density of nitrogen, and shall be obliged if any of your chemical readers can offer suggestions as to the cause. According to two methods of preparation I obtain quite distinct values.

John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh

In Physics... as in every other science, common sense alone is not supreme; there must also be a place for Reason.

Concerning the intimate nature of heat, or of electricity, etc., I know nothing, any more than I know the intimate nature of any matter whatsoever, or of anything else.

Julius von Mayer

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... 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.

James Clerk Maxwell

Your father bears an iron reed
Filled with a flame that makes us bleed;
Your kindly mother loves to tear
Feathers and skin to deck her hair.

Everyone believes in the normal law, the experimenters because they imagine that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact.

Gabriel Lippmann

Mathematical physics is in the first place physics and it could not exist without experimental investigations.

The numerical description of a vector requires three numbers, but nothing prevents us from using a single number for its symbolical designation. An algebra or analytical method in which a single letter or other expression is used to specify a vector may be called a vector algebra or vector analysis.

Josiah Willard Gibbs

Science is intelligence in action with no holds barred.

Percy Williams Bridgman

In quantum mechanics, we are not dealing with an arbitrary renunciation of a more detailed analysis of atomic phenomena, but with a recognition that such an analysis is in principle excluded.

Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before.

Clinton Davisson

One of the most important features about time is its irreversibility. Time flows on and never comes back. When the physicist is confronted with this fact he is greatly disturbed. All the laws of physics in their elementary forms are reversible.

Léon Brillouin

I think, without exception, the diamond is the most sensitive substance I have yet met for ready and brilliant phosphorescence.

William Crookes

If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.

Erwin Schrödinger

All science has its origin in the needs of life.

I am afraid the knockabout comedy of modern atomic physics is not very tender towards our aesthetic ideals. The stately drama of stellar evolution turns out to be more like the hair-breadth escapades in the films. The music of the spheres has a painful suggestion of — jazz.

Arthur Eddington

Yet the atom, for all that, is not Nature's unit, but ours.

Frederick Soddy

It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, "rest."