French Scientist Quotes

As the History of any Science ought to relate the labours, the discoveries, and the errors of the cultivators of that Science; and to shew the obstacles which they have been obliged to surmount, and the mistaken paths into which they have sometimes been misled; it cannot therefore fail of being very useful to persons engaged in the same pursuits.

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest.

Paul Sabatier (chemist)

[Fire is] the most potent Agent that Nature hath furnished us withal under Heaven, to perform the Anatomy of Mixt Bodies.

Nicasius le Febure

We are not sufficiently astonished by the fact that any science may be possible.

Louis de Broglie

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

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

To be in a position to discover the laws which link phenomena together, it is important to make use of the very powerful instrument of calculation ("le calcul ") by means of which one may more easily grasp the relations between bodies.

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac