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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 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
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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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Matter being nothing but a sort of congealed radiation travelling at less than its normal speed.
James Jeans
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It would be a dull mind that could see the rich variety of natural phenomena without wondering how they are inter-related.
James Jeans
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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
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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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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
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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
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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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The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a machine.
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 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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The immensity of space is paralleled by that of time.
James Jeans
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
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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