John Henry Poynting Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

The threads of life, coming in we know not where, now twining together, now dividing, are weaving patterns of their own, ever increasing in intricacy, ever gaining in beauty.

John Henry Poynting
On the purely physical or descriptive view, the idea of cause is quite out of place. In description we are solely concerned with the "how" of things, and their "why" we purposely leave out of account.

John Henry Poynting
We are no longer content to describe what we actually see or feel, but we describe what we imagine we should see or feel if our senses were on quite another scale of magnitude and sensibility. We cease to be physicists of the real and become physicists of the ideal.

John Henry Poynting
The aim of explanation... is to reduce the number of laws as far as possible, by showing that laws, at first separated, may be merged in one; to reduce the number of chapters in the book of science by showing that some are truly mere sub-sections of chapters already written.

John Henry Poynting
Molecules, atoms and corpuscles are at the present day the letters of the alphabet in which we write our knowledge of Physical Nature.

John Henry Poynting
A law may fail or cease to be true, not because Nature has changed her ways, but because we have failed in our statement of likenesses, or because we learn new details with which our old description does not tally.

John Henry Poynting
While the investigation of Nature is ever increasing our knowledge, and while each new discovery is a positive addition never again to be lost, the range of the investigation and the nature of the knowledge gained form the theme of endless discussion.

John Henry Poynting
If our mental experience convinces us that we have freedom of choice, we are obliged to believe that in mind there is territory which the physicist can never annex. Some of his laws may still hold good, but somewhere or other his scheme must cease to give a true account.

John Henry Poynting
To take an old but never-worn-out metaphor, the physicist is examining the garment of Nature, learning of how many, or rather of how few different kinds of thread it is woven, finding how each separate thread enters into the pattern, and seeking from the pattern woven in the past to know the pattern yet to come.

John Henry Poynting
The range of the physicist's study consists in the visible motions and other sensible changes of matter. The experiences with which he deals are the impressions on his senses, and his aim is to describe in the shortest possible way how his various senses have been, will be, or would be affected.

John Henry Poynting
Compare, for instance, the accuracy with which we can describe and foretell the path of a planet with our ignorance of the movements of the atmosphere as dependent on the heat of the sun. The planet keeps to the astronomer's timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.

John Henry Poynting