Henry Augustus Rowland - The Physical Papers

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There is no such thing as absolute truth and absolute falsehood. The scientific mind should never recognise the perfect truth or the perfect falsehood of any supposed theory or observation. It should carefully weigh the chances of truth and error and grade each in its proper position along the line joining absolute truth and absolute error.

Henry Augustus Rowland
It is a curious fact that, having minds tending to the infinite, with imaginations unlimited by time and space, the limits of our exact knowledge are very small indeed.

Henry Augustus Rowland
A mathematical investigation always obeys the law of the conservation of knowledge: we never get out more from it than we put in.

Henry Augustus Rowland
He who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before is the benefactor of mankind; but he who obscurely worked to find the laws of such growth is the intellectual superior as well as the greater benefactor of the two.

Henry Augustus Rowland
The object of education is not only to produce a man who knows, but one who does; who makes his mark in the straggle of life and succeeds well in whatever he undertakes: who can solve the problems of nature and of humanity as they arise, and who, when he knows he is right, can boldly convince the world of the fact.

Henry Augustus Rowland
The aims of the physicist... are in part purely intellectual: he strives to understand the universe on account of the intellectual pleasure derived from the pursuit, but he is upheld in it by the knowledge that the study of nature's secrets is the ordained method by which the greatest good and happiness shall finally come to the human race.

Henry Augustus Rowland
Discoveries have their origin not only in the presence of men of exceptional genius in the world, but in a true and overwhelming progress of science which marches forward to the understanding of the universe, irrespective of the efforts of any single individual to promote or retard it.

Henry Augustus Rowland