James Jeans Quotes

109 Sourced Quotes

It would be a dull mind that could see the rich variety of natural phenomena without wondering how they are inter-related.

James Jeans
The child who is beginning to learn algebra never takes kindly to x, y and z ; he is only satisfied when he is told that they are: numbers of apples or pears or something such.

James Jeans
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
We have found out that nature does not function in a way that can be made comprehensible to the human mind through models or pictures.

James Jeans
For as the wind bloweth where it listeth, so no one can control the direction in which science will advance; the investigator in pure science does not know himself whether his researches will result in a mere labor-saving device or a new industry.

James Jeans
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
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a machine.

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

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
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.

James Jeans
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
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
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
The cosmologist, accepting the universe for what it is, must try to discover why it is thus and not otherwise.

James Jeans
Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.

James Jeans
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
Time figures as the mortar which binds the bricks of matter together.

James Jeans