19th-century Scientist Quotes

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

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 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

Light, properly so called, is only a narrowly defined part of a far greater phenomenon, that of radiation in general.... The lengths of [visible] light waves fall between close limits; but the rules of wave motion apply to the infinitesimal waves of X-rays on one hand and to the long radio waves on the other.

William Henry Bragg

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.

The natural laws are rude unbending powers, which have neither morals nor heart.

In our day but little time elapses between the discovery and its application.

Any scientific problem must be attacked by research into detail; the natural scientist did not win his victories until he left meditation on the great riddles of the world and began a careful study of special problems; our knowledge — of more general associations and of far-reaching laws — has grown out of the results of such research.

Hans von Euler-Chelpin

Happy is the man who has acquired the love of walking for its own sake!

William Jacob Holland

The relic is to the past as is the germ to the future.

William Robert Grove

Here, then, we have the oldest known rocks. Are they, then, absolutely the oldest — the primitive rocks, as some imagine? By no means. They are stratified rocks, and therefore consolidated sediments, and therefore, also, the debris of still older rocks, of which we know nothing. Thus, we seek in vain for the absolutely oldest, the primitive crust.

My familiarity with the successful use of very long steel ropes for mining purposes naturally suggested their adaptation to the new purpose of deep sea work.

Alexander Agassiz

Like the human and other sciences, zoology has arisen from that vague uncoordinated and unresolved mass of knowledge, the Natural Philosophy of not very remote times, which undertook to comprehend all there was of nature and thought.

There is a thought which connects every human being with the infinite.

L. Hamilton McCormick

Whatever notions people may entertain respecting the dignity of the human race, there is no gainsaying the fact that we share with the lower animals the rather humiliating privilege and prerogative of entertaining a great variety of parasites.

Thomas Spencer Cobbold

Nearly every inference we make with respect to any future event is more or less doubtful. If the circumstances are favorable, a forecast may be made with a greater degree of confidence than if the conditions are not so disposed.

Joseph William Mellor

Although the vulgar cannot fathom all the mysteries of the heavens, their imagination receives some compensation in the strange fancies which comets engender, as they have always enjoyed the privilege of creating ecstasy.

Félix Archimède Pouchet

Those young people of today, who will be the leaders of thought and of action tomorrow, are faced with the problem of enduring that, in gaining control over Nature, man does not lose his own soul.

E. John Russell

The biologist who studies heredity is very much like a mathematician who is studying a very complex function with the aid of partial differential equations and who tries to analyze the properties and the function about a point without being able as in the case of an elementary function to study it in itself, directly in all its respects.

Maurice Caullery

Saying that each of two atoms can attain closed electron shells by sharing a pair of electrons is equivalent to saying that husband and wife, by having a total of two dollars in a joint account and each having six dollars in individual bank accounts, have eight dollars apiece!

Kazimierz Fajans

It is through the medium of our senses alone that we derive our knowledge of the phenomena of external nature.

George Frederick Barker