James Jeans Quotes

109 Sourced Quotes

We now know that there is, in principle, no permanence in substance; it is mere bottled energy, and possesses no more inherent permanence than bottled beer.

James Jeans
Most sciences progress by pursuing nature into the realms of infinitely small, but for astronomy and cosmogony progress lies in the direction of the infinitely great, or, to be more exact, of the unthinkably great.

James Jeans
Physics tries to discover the pattern of events which controls the phenomena we observe. But we can never know what this pattern means or how it originates; and even if some superior intelligence were to tell us, we should find the explanation unintelligible.

James Jeans
Because we are human beings and not mere animals, we try to discover as much as we can about the world in which our lives are cast. We have seen that there is only one method of gaining such knowledge - the method of science, which consists in a direct questioning of nature by observation and experiment.

James Jeans
The physicist who can discard his human spectacles, and can see clearly in the strange new light which then assails his eyes, finds himself living in an unfamiliar world, which even his immediate predecessors would probably fail to recognize.

James Jeans
The motion of the stars over our heads is as much an illusion as that of the cows, trees and churches that flash past the windows of our train.

James Jeans
The astronomer is satisfied if he can see the universe as it is, the cosmologist must ever strive to see it as it has been and as it will be.

James Jeans
The universe was a stage in which always the same actors — the atoms — played their parts, differing in disguises and groupings, but without change of identity. And these actors were endowed with immortality.

James Jeans
The fabric of the universe weathers, crumbles, and dissolves with age, and no restoration or reconstruction is possible. The second law of thermodynamics compels the material universe to move ever in the same direction along the same road, a road which ends only in death and annihilation.

James Jeans
Each observation destroys the bit of the universe observed, and so supplies knowledge only of a universe which has already become past history.

James Jeans
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

James Jeans
Kronecker is quoted as saying that in arithmetic God made the integers and man made the rest; in the same spirit we may perhaps say that in physics God made the mathematics and man made the rest.

James Jeans
The philosophy of any period is always largely interwoven with the science of the period, so that any fundamental change in science must produce reactions in philosophy.

James Jeans
Nothing is gained by saying that the loom of nature works like our muscles if we cannot explain how our muscles work.

James Jeans
If an interpretation of the workings of nature is to mean anything to us, it must be in terms of ideas which are already in our minds - otherwise it will be incomprehensible to us, and cannot add to our knowledge.

James Jeans
Old Mother Earth must regard man as a very recent apparition indeed; he has just appeared to burrow into her, burn her forests, put her waterfalls into pipes, and generally mar the beauty of her features.

James Jeans
In whatever ways we define science and philosophy their territories are contiguous; wherever science leaves off — and in many places its boundary is ill-defined — there philosophy begins.

James Jeans
Any small bit of the sky does not look very different from what it would if bright and faint stars had been sprinkled out of a celestial pepper pot.

James Jeans
It can hardly be disputed that nature and our conscious mathematical minds work according to the same laws.

James Jeans
It is frequently more difficult to frame a sensible question than to obtain an answer to a nonsensical one.

James Jeans
We can only see nature blurred by the clouds of dust we ourselves make; we can still only see the rainbow, but a sun of some sort must exist to produce the light by which we see it.

James Jeans
The essential fact is simply that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathematical pictures.

James Jeans
Standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand, we attempt to discover the nature and purpose of the universe which surrounds our home in space and time.

James Jeans
The hard sphere... has always a definite position in space; the electron apparently has not. A hard sphere takes up a very definite amount of room; an electron — well it is probably as meaningless to discuss how much room an electron takes up as it is to discuss how much room a fear, an anxiety, or an uncertainty takes up.

James Jeans
It does not at present look as though Nature had designed the universe primarily for life; the normal star and the normal nebula have nothing to do with life except making it impossible. Life is the end of a chain of byproducts; it seems to be the accident, and life-destroying radiation the essential.

James Jeans
The universe can not go on forever as it now is, and neither can it have existed in its present condition from all eternity.

James Jeans
Empty Waterloo Station of everything except six specks of dust and it is still far more crowded with dust than space is with stars.

James Jeans
The electrons may now be pictured as octopus-like structures with tentacles or "tubes of force" sticking out from it in every direction.

James Jeans
When two hypotheses are possible, we provisionally choose that which our minds adjudge to be the simpler, on the supposition that this is more likely to lead in the direction of the truth. It includes as a special case the principle of Occam's razor — Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

James Jeans
The immensity of space is paralleled by that of time.

James Jeans