James Jeans - Nature Quotes

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

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

James Jeans
Before the quantum theory appeared, the principle of the uniformity of nature - that like causes produce like effects - had been accepted as a universal and indisputable fact of science. As soon as the atomicity of radiation became established, this principle had to be discarded.

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
Nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.

James Jeans
A second conspicuous landmark... is the enunciation of the fundamental law of radioactive disintegration by Rutherford and Soddy in 1903. This law was in no sense a consequence or development of Plank's theories; indeed fourteen years were to elapse before any connection was noticed between the two. The new law asserted that the atoms of radioactive substances broke up spontaneously, and not because of any particular conditions or special happenings. This seemed to involve an even more startling break with classical theory than the new laws of Plank; radioactive break-up appeared to be an effect without a cause, and suggested that the ultimate laws of nature were not even causal.

James Jeans
Heisenberg now approached the problem from a new philosophical angle. He discarded all models, pictures and parables, and made a clear distinction between sure knowledge we gain from observation of nature and the conjectural knowledge we introduce when we use models, pictures and parables. Sure knowledge... can only be numerical, so that Heisenberg's results were inevitably mathematical in form, and could not disclose anything about the true nature of physical properties or entities.

James Jeans
Kant, discussing the various modes of perception by which the human mind apprehends nature, concluded that it is specially prone to see nature through mathematical spectacles. Just as a man wearing blue spectacles would see only a blue world, so Kant thought that, with our mental bias, we tend to see only a mathematical world.

James Jeans
Nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.

James Jeans
... when the experiment was attempted by Michelson and Morley it failed, thus showing that space and time assumed in the picture were not true to the facts of nature.... the pattern of events was the same whether the world stood at rest in the supposed ether, or had an ether wind blowing through it at a million miles an hour. It began to look as though the supposed ether was not very important in the scheme of things... and so might as well be abandoned. But if the bell-rope is to be discarded, what is to ring the bell?

James Jeans
The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature—a space which is finite; a space which is empty, so that one point [of our 'material' world] differs from another solely in the properties of space itself; four-dimensional, seven- and more dimensional spaces; a space which for ever expands; a sequence of events which follows the laws of probability instead of the law of causation—or alternatively, a sequence of events which can only be fully and consistently described by going outside of space and time—all these concepts seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incapable of realisation in any sense which would properly be described as material.

James Jeans