19th-century Scientist Quotes

A patent is a legal analog of sticky fly paper: it attracts some of the lowest forms of life.

David L. Webster

... the ultimate objective of teaching physics is promoting a sound physical thinking and not merely tackling a list of topics.

Győző Zemplén

It is thus that statistics reveals more and more the inconstancy and the irregularity of much social phenomena, when in lieu of applying it to a great nation altogether, one descends to a province, a town, a village.

Jean Baptiste Perrin

According to my views, aiming at quantitative investigations, that is at establishing relations between measurements of phenomena, should take first place in the experimental practice of physics. By measurement to knowledge [door meten tot weten] I should like to write as a motto above the entrance to every physics laboratory.

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

It must be confessed that the new quantum mechanics is far from satisfying the requirements of the layman who seeks to clothe his conceptions in figurative language. Indeed, its originators probably hold that such symbolic representation is inherently impossible. It is earnestly to be hoped that this is not their last word on the subject, and that they may yet be successful in expressing the quantum postulate in picturesque form.

H. Stanley Allen

I ndeed, one of the most important of our fundamental assumptions must be that the ether not only occupies all space between molecules, atoms, or electrons, but that it pervades all these particles. We shall add the hypothesis that, though the particles may move, the ether always remains at rest.

Hendrik Lorentz

The advance from drawing to painting should be gradual, and no serious attempts in colour should be made until the student has obtained proficiency in outline and in light and shade. If the artist cannot draws objects in a rather masterly way there is no point in his attempting colour.

If a poet could at the same time be a physicist, he might convey to others the pleasure, the satisfaction, almost the reverence, which the subject inspires. The aesthetic side of the subject is, I confess, by no means the least attractive to me. Especially is its fascination felt in the branch which deals with light.

Albert A. Michelson

The highest object to which the natural sciences are constrained to aim, but which they will never reach, is the determination of the forces, which are present in nature, and of the state of matter at any given moment - that is, the reduction of all the phenomena of nature to mechanics.

Gustav Kirchhoff

The trouble is that all the investigators proceeded in exactly the same spirit, the spirit that is of scientific curiosity, and with no possibility of telling whether the issue of their work would prove them to be fiends, or dreamers, or angels.

Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh

When the teacher has once obtained the mastery over the experiments he will never after be willing to teach without them; for, as an honest teacher, he will know that he cannot teach without them.

Alfred M. Mayer

To regard analogy as an aid to the invention of theories is as absurd as to regard melody as an aid to the composition of sonatas.

Norman Robert Campbell

I thank God humbly and sincerely. God, who has visited us with many trials, and led us like the Israelites of old from place to place without any certain abode, bless, we beseech Thee, our return home, and mercifully grant that the afflictions and anxieties of that long probation may bear fruit in a more self-denying and godly life ; and that we may have our hearts fixed on a yet more abiding resting-place, eternal in the heavens, for Jesus Christ's sake.'

James David Forbes

If our world is not "the best of all possible worlds" it certainly is the only one in which it is possible to avoid the dilemma of discontinuity.

Compare, for instance, the accuracy with which we can describe and foretell the path of a planet with our ignorance of the movements of the atmosphere as dependent on the heat of the sun. The planet keeps to the astronomer's timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.

John Henry Poynting

There are two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand was Einstein, and on the other all the rest.

Rudolf Ladenburg

I believe that the advent of modern science is the most important social event in all history.

Karl Taylor Compton

The question whether our elementary atoms are in their nature indivisible, or whether they are built up of smaller particles, is one upon which I, as a chemist, have no hold whatever, and I may say that in chemistry the question is not raised by any evidence whatever.

Alexander William Williamson

This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments.... For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the Earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15180 calories.... The energy of our most violent explosive - nitroglycerine - is less than 1500 calories per grammer. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one tenth of the energy to escape the Earth … hence the proposition appears to be basically unsound.

I prefer to use the term "theory," with the above understood qualification, viz... a theory in its hypothetical stage.

Science... is, in its source, eternal; in its operation, not limited by time and space; in its scope, immeasurable; in its problem, endless; in its goal, unattainable.

Karl Ernst von Baer

A physicist studying geology is by definition a geologist.

William Johnson Sollas

The skeletal striated muscle cell of amphibia therefore resembles the cardiac striated muscle cell in the property of 'all or none' contraction.

Keith Lucas (scientist)

Call us not weeds, we are flowers of the Sea,
For lovely and bright and gay tinted are we,
And quite independent of sun's fire or showers-
Then call us not weeds! We are ocean's bright flowers,
Not nursed like the plants of a summer parterre,
Where gales are but sighs of an evening air,
Our exquisite, fragile and delicate forms
Are nursed by the Ocean and rocked by the Storms.

Indeed the intellectual basis of all empirical knowledge may be said to be a matter of probability, expressible only in terms of a bet.

William Cecil Dampier