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James Jeans Quotes
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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
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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
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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
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We of the present age know very little — almost nothing; we are rather pioneers setting out to explore a new country. We have the thrill of ever-changing views, now and again we reach a ridge or summit which opens up new and unexpected vistas — of necessity our point of view must continually change.
James Jeans
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Time figures as the mortar which binds the bricks of matter together.
James Jeans
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To this present-day science adds that, at the farthest point she has so far reached, much, and possibly all, that was not mental has disappeared, and nothing new has come in that is not mental. Yet who shall say what we may find awaiting us round the next corner?
James Jeans
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Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.
James Jeans
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The cosmologist, accepting the universe for what it is, must try to discover why it is thus and not otherwise.
James Jeans
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The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulae and the phenomena they describe is not a step towards, but a step away from reality; it is like making graven images of a spirit... All the same, the mathematical physicist is still busily at work making graven images of the concepts of the wave-mechanics.
James Jeans
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Students of evolution in the animal world tell us that the ear was the last of the sense-organs to arrive; it is beyond question the most intricate and the most wonderful.
James Jeans
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We may say that we have already considered with disfavor the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.
James Jeans
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If we assume that the last breath of, say, Julius Caesar has by now become thoroughly scattered through the atmosphere, then the chances are that each of us inhales one molecule of it with every breath we take.
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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
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The immensity of space is paralleled by that of time.
James Jeans
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The tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole material universe into waves, and nothing but waves. These waves are of two kinds: bottled-up waves, which we call matter, and unbottled waves, which we call radiation or light.
James Jeans
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Time leaves its mark, its wrinkles and its grey hairs, on the stars, so that we can guess their ages tolerable well, and the evidence is all in favor of stellar lives, not of thousands of millions, but of millions of millions, of years.
James Jeans
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The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a machine.
James Jeans
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Matter being nothing but a sort of congealed radiation travelling at less than its normal speed.
James Jeans
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The lantern of science, throwing its light down the long corridors of time, enables us to trace out the gradual evolution of terrestrial life.
James Jeans
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Space, regarded as a receptacle for radiant energy, is a bottomless pit.
James Jeans
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We know of no type of astronomical body in which the conditions can be favorable to life except planets like our own revolving round a sun... Only an infinitesimally small corner of the universe can be in the least suited to form an abode of life.
James Jeans
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To many it is not knowledge but the quest for knowledge that gives the greater interest to thought — to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
James Jeans
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All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them.
James Jeans
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So little do we understand time that perhaps we ought to compare the whole of time to the act of creation.
James Jeans
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So long as the earth was believed to be the center of the universe the question of life on the other worlds could hardly arise; there are no other worlds in the astronomical sense, although a heaven above and a hell beneath might form adjuncts to this world.
James Jeans
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
James Jeans
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Born:
September 11, 1877
Died:
September 16, 1946
(aged 69)
Bio:
Sir James Hopwood Jeans was an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician.
Most used words:
space
electron
mechanics
time
classical
law
radiation
theory
matter
forces
nature
physics
energy
atom
motion
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