James Clerk Maxwell Quotes

87 Sourced Quotes

It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.

James Clerk Maxwell
Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men's hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression 'structureless germs'

James Clerk Maxwell
No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction.

James Clerk Maxwell
Where molecules with fierce desires, Shiver in hot embraces The atoms clash, the spectra flash, Projected on the screen, The double D, magnesian b, And Thallium's living green.

James Clerk Maxwell
The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?

James Clerk Maxwell
[Molecular science is] one of those branches of study which deal with things invisible and imperceptible by our senses, and which cannot be subjected to direct experiment.

James Clerk Maxwell
By the hollow mauntain-side
Questions strange I shout for ever,
While echoes far and wide
Seem to mock my vain endeavour;
Still I shout, for though they never
Cast my borrowed voice aside,
Words from empty words they sever—
Words of Truth from words of Pride.

James Clerk Maxwell
The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics.

James Clerk Maxwell
Each molecule... throughout the universe bears impressed upon it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre of the Archives at Paris, or the double royal cubit of the temple of Karnac.

James Clerk Maxwell
Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of electromagnetism.

James Clerk Maxwell
How freely he scatters his atoms before the beginning of years; How he clothes them with force as a garment, those small incompressible spheres!

James Clerk Maxwell
We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.

James Clerk Maxwell
But though the professed aim of all scientific work is to unravel the secrets of nature, it has another effect, not less valuable, on the mind of the worker. It leaves him in possession of methods which nothing but scientific work could have led him to invent.

James Clerk Maxwell
Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.

James Clerk Maxwell
As long as we have to deal with only two molecules, and have all the data given us, we can calculate the result of their encounter; but when we have to deal with millions of molecules, each of which has millions of encounters in a second, the complexity of the problem seems to shut out all hope of a legitimate solution.

James Clerk Maxwell
The theory I propose may therefore be called a theory of the Electromagnetic Field because it has to do with the space in the neighbourhood of the electric or magnetic bodies, and it may be called a Dynamical Theory, because it assumes that in the space there is matter in motion, by which the observed electromagnetic phenomena are produced.

James Clerk Maxwell
Scientific truth should be presented in different forms, and should be regarded as equally scientific whether it appears in the robust form and the vivid colouring of a physical illustration, or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolic expression.

James Clerk Maxwell
Though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built — the foundation-stones of the material universe — remain unbroken and unworn.

James Clerk Maxwell
I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.

James Clerk Maxwell
In every experiment we have first to make our senses familiar with the phenomenon.

James Clerk Maxwell
An atom is a body which cannot be cut in two.

James Clerk Maxwell
The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds.

James Clerk Maxwell
Gases are distinguished from other forms of matter, not only by their power of indefinite expansion so as to fill any vessel, however large, and by the great effect heat has in dilating them, but by the uniformity and simplicity of the laws which regulate these changes.

James Clerk Maxwell
In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy.

James Clerk Maxwell
I have also cleared the electromagnetic theory of light from all unwarrantable assumption, so that we may safely determine the velocity of light by measuring the attraction between bodies kept at a given difference of potential, the value of which is known in electromagnetic measure.

James Clerk Maxwell