Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

Classical mechanics is mathematical not only in the sense that it makes use of mathematical terms and methods for abbreviating arguments which might, if necessary, also be expressed in the language of everyday speech; it is so also in the much more stringent sense that its basic concepts are mathematical concepts, that mechanics itself is a mathematics.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis
Modern science was born in the period beginning with Copernicus's work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (l543) and ending with Newton's Philosophia Naturalis Philosophiae Mathematica.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis
It is pointed out convincingly by George Sarton in The Life of Science that the development of science, as contrasted with that of art, is cumulative and progressive. Every scientist is educated in the current knowledge of his age and, making use of all he has learned, attempts to add something of his own to the existing body of knowledge. For this reason it is essentially impossible to isolate his personal achievements from the total pattern of scientific development. It follows that one cannot write the scientific life story of an isolated scholar, but only the history of the branches of science in which he participated.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis
Plato makes the cosmos a living being by investing the world-body with a world-soul.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis
[The mathematical character of Descartes' physics lies in its methodological nature, namely, the] axiomatic structure of the whole system, in the establishment of indubitable foundations and the deduction of the phenomena.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis
Mechanics... was an axiomatic construction; and... its problem could be solved quantitatively by algebraic methods.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis