19th-century Scientist Quotes

The trouble with Physics at the present time is that there are so many workers making discoveries so fast, and important discoveries too, that it is difficult for any one worker to keep a balanced view of the state of the subject.

Owen Willans Richardson

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

Clinton Davisson

The rotating armatures of every generator and motor in this age of electricity are steadily proclaiming the truth of the relativity theory to all who have ears to hear.

Discovery, even the most apparently insignificant, will end by being of use to man.

Auguste Piccard

A Corpuscle once did oscillate so quickly to and fro,
He always raised disturbances wherever he did go. He struggled hard for freedom against a powerful foe — An atom — who wouldn't let him go.

Thus, since it is this power in the atmosphere of storing the heat which makes us live, no less than the sun's rays themselves, we see how the temperature of a planet may depend on considerations quite beside its distance from the sun; and when we discuss the possibility of life in other worlds, we shall do well to remember that Saturn may be possibly a warm world, and Mercury conceivably a cold one.

Samuel Pierpont Langley

Hypotheses are like questions which we put to Nature, but the answers she gives are not simply "yes" and "no;" but it can be so, or it cannot.

Johann Heinrich Jakob Müller

Astronomy is the distinguished child of the gypsy-like mother, astrology.

Charles Greeley Abbot

Individually, man is more or less of an enigma; in the mass he is a mathematical problem.

In consequence of my measurements of Kerr's magnetooptical phenomena, the thought occurred to me whether the period of the light emitted by a flame might be altered when the flame was acted upon by magnetic force. It has turned out that such an action really occurs.

The facts which our theories enable us to discover, subsist and are linked together long after these theories have disappeared. Out of the materials of former edifices overthrown, new dwellings are constantly being reconstructed.

Lucien Poincaré

When interpreting nature's work, we are obliged frequently to speak of high numbers and small fractions.

George Johnstone Stoney

The discoverer of a law is he who first generalizes whether he has or has not taken part in the discovery of the facts on which the generalization is made.

Osborne Reynolds

There is, perhaps, no scientific inquiry more full of human interest, than the study of the nature of heat, and the manner in which matter in general is affected by it. No branch of physical science is so intimately connected with the everyday occupations of life, and, consequently, none of them interests mankind more closely.

Thomas Preston (scientist)

A soap bubble is a beautiful thing. It appeals to several senses and to many kinds of minds; it is a source of delight to children, and we who know what somewhat of the mysteries of molecular physics which it helps to reveal look at it with admiration.

All our civilization is based on inventions; before invention, men lived on fruits and nuts and pine cones and slept in caves.

Reginald Fessenden

Viewing the laws of the electric circuit from the point at which the labours of Ohm has placed us, there is scarcely any branch of experimental science in which so many and such various phenomena are expressed by formulae of such simplicity and generality...

Charles Wheatstone

Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech - what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was.

Jens Peter Jacobsen

It is the care we bestow on apparently trifling, unattractive and very troublesome minutiae which determines the results.

Everybody is pathological to a certain degree...the more so the elevated his standing...only myth and cliche have that a person must be either sane or crazy.

Paul Julius Möbius

Narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature.

Experience... can only deal with the past; and the moment we attempt to project experience a hair's breadth beyond the point it has at any moment reached, we are condemned by reason.

Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.

Facts are plentiful enough, but we know not how to class them; many are overlooked because they seem uninteresting: but remember that what led Newton to pursue and discover the law of gravity, and ultimately the laws by which worlds revolve, was - the fall of an apple.

Michael Faraday

The scientific paradox is only an exception to some familiar but too inclusive generalization. It, therefore, has both the appeal of the riddle and the charm of surprise — the surprise, the instant the truth is seen, of a sudden and unexpected discovery....

William Jackson Humphreys