Oliver Heaviside Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

By any process of reasoning whatever (not fancy) you cannot get any results that are not implicitly contained in the material with which you work, the fundamental data and their connections, which form the basis of your inquiry.

Oliver Heaviside
There are men of a certain type of mind who are never wearied with gibing at mathematics, at mathematicians, and at mathematical methods of inquiry. It goes almost without saying that these men have themselves little mathematical bent.

Oliver Heaviside
Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency.

Oliver Heaviside
Some of the unmathematical believe that the mathematician is merely engaged in counting or in doing long sums; this probably arises from reminiscences of their schooldays, when they were flogged over fractions.

Oliver Heaviside
"Mathematics is gibberish." Little need be said about this statement. It is only worthy of the utterly illiterate.

Oliver Heaviside
The unknown is not necessarily unknowable; fresh knowns may make the former unknowns become also known.

Oliver Heaviside
There are no inscrutables in Nature. By Faith only can we go beyond - as far and where we please.

Oliver Heaviside
The real object of true naturalists, in Sir W. Thomson's meaning of the word, when they employ mathematics to assist them, is not to make mathematical exercises (though that may be necessary), but to find out the connections of known phenomena, and by deductive reasoning, to obtain a knowledge of hitherto unknown phenomena.

Oliver Heaviside
People who do not cultivate their minds have no conception of what they lose. They become mere eating and drinking and money-grabbing machines. And yet they seem happy! There is some merciful dispensation at work, no doubt.

Oliver Heaviside
Let them [facts] be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter. Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.

Oliver Heaviside
Even if we resolve all matter into one kind, that kind will need explaining, and so on for ever and ever deeper and deeper into the pit at whose bottom truth lies, without ever reaching it, for the pit is bottomless.

Oliver Heaviside
But it is perhaps too much to expect a man to be both the prince of experimentalists and a competent mathematician.

Oliver Heaviside
In general, the mathematics required is more or less of the character sometimes termed transcendental. This is a grandiloquent word, suggestive of something beyond human capacity to find out; a word to frighten timid people into believing that it is all speculation, and therefore unsound.

Oliver Heaviside
Even Cambridge mathematicians deserve justice.

Oliver Heaviside
Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first but later on.

Oliver Heaviside
We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth. But, as was mentioned to me not long since, "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit.

Oliver Heaviside
Every mind should receive fair development (in good directions) for what it is capable of doing fairly well.

Oliver Heaviside
An old idea that the speed of gravitation must be an enormous multiple of the speed of light... is only moonshine.

Oliver Heaviside
It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties in Euclid's Elements, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally.. obvious.

Oliver Heaviside
Theory always tends to become more abstract as it emerges successfully from the chaos of facts by processes of differentiation and elimination, whereby the essentials and their connections become recognized, while minor effects are seen to be secondary or unessential, and are ignored temporarily, to be explained by additional means.

Oliver Heaviside
The anti-mathematician must belong to the same class as the paradoxer, whose characteristic is to be wise in his ignorance, whereas the really wise man is ignorant in his wisdom.

Oliver Heaviside
The assumption of a special act of creation, either now or at any time, is merely a confession of ignorance.

Oliver Heaviside
The best result of mathematics is to be able to do without it.

Oliver Heaviside
Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of electromagnetics, in spite of the abstract nature of its theory, involving quantities whose nature is entirely unknown at the present, is really and truly founded on the observations of real Newtonian forces, electric and magnetic respectively.

Oliver Heaviside
However absurd it may seem, I do in all seriousness hereby declare that I am animated mainly by philanthropic motives. I desire to do good to my fellow creatures, even to the Cui bonos.

Oliver Heaviside
Waves from moving sources: Adagio. Andante. Allegro moderato.

Oliver Heaviside
If it is love that makes the world go round, it is self-induction that makes electromagnetic waves go round the world.

Oliver Heaviside
There is no absolute scale of size in nature, and the small may be as important, or more so than the great.

Oliver Heaviside
Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?

Oliver Heaviside
Mathematics is of two kinds, Rigorous and Physical. The former is Narrow: the latter Bold and Broad. To have to stop to formulate rigorous demonstrations would put a stop to most physico-mathematical inquiries. Am I to refuse to eat because I do not fully understand the mechanism of digestion?

Oliver Heaviside