Léon Brillouin Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

With Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the fundamental role of experimental errors became a basic feature of physics.

Léon Brillouin
Both the uncertainty principle and the negentropy principle of information make Laplace's scheme [of exact determinism] completely unrealistic. The problem is an artificial one; it belongs to imaginative poetry, not to experimental science.

Léon Brillouin
The laws of classical mechanics represent a mathematical idealization and should not be assumed to correspond to the real laws of nature. … We now have to realize that errors are inevitable (..) a discovery that makes strict determinism impossible.

Léon Brillouin
We completely ignore the human value of the information. A selection of 100 letters is given a certain information value, and we do not investigate whether it makes sense in English, and, if so, whether the meaning of the sentence is of any practical importance. According to our definition, a set of 100 letters selected at random (according to the rules of Table 1.1), a sentence of 100 letters from a newspaper, a piece of Shakespeare or a theorem of Einstein are given exactly the same informational value.

Léon Brillouin
Perfect logic and faultless deduction make a pleasant theoretical structure, but it may be right or wrong; the experimenter is the only one to decide, and he is always right.

Léon Brillouin
It is impossible to study the properties of a single mathematical trajectory. The physicist knows only bundles of trajectories, corresponding to slightly different initial conditions.

Léon Brillouin
An artist's inspiration or a scientist's theory, reveal the unpredictable power of human imagination.

Léon Brillouin
One of the most important features about time is its irreversibility. Time flows on and never comes back. When the physicist is confronted with this fact he is greatly disturbed. All the laws of physics in their elementary forms are reversible.

Léon Brillouin