Oliver Lodge Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

Basing my conclusions on experience I am absolutely convinced not only of survival but of demonstrated survival, demonstrated by occasional interaction with matter in such a way as to produce physical results.

Oliver Lodge
Life must be considered sui generis; it is not a form of energy, nor can it be expressed in terms of something else.

Oliver Lodge
Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence.

Oliver Lodge
In other cases, when the medium becomes entranced, the demonstration of a communicator's separate intelligence may become stronger and the sophistication less.

Oliver Lodge
We do not in the least know how to harness the energy locked up in the atoms of matter. If it could be liberated at will, we would experience a violence beside which the suddenness of high explosive is gentle and leisurely.

Oliver Lodge
A body can only act immediately on what it is in contact with; it must be by the action of contiguous particles—that is, practically, through a continuous medium, that force can be transmitted across space.

Oliver Lodge
Science aims at a vigorous adult, intelligent, serpentlike wisdom, and active interference with the course of nature; religion aims at a meek, receptive, child-hearted attitude of dovelike resignation to the Divine will.

Oliver Lodge
The waves of light are not anything mechanical or material, but are something electrical and magnetic—they are, in fact, electrical disturbances periodic in space and time, and travelling with a known and tremendous speed through the ether of space. Their very existence depends upon the ether, and their speed of propagation is its best known and most certain quantitative property.

Oliver Lodge
I am as convinced of continued existence, on the other side of death, as I am of existence here. It may said, you cannot be sure as you are of sensory experience. I say I can. A physicist is never limited to direct sensory impressions, he has to deal with a multitude of conceptions and things for which he has no physical organ....

Oliver Lodge
It is undeniable that mathematicians, with a self-denying ordinance about coefficients, can thus attain remarkable criteria, and are able to anticipate definite results; but we need not seek to engraft their modes of expression on the real world of physics.

Oliver Lodge
It must be admitted that among a certain number of advanced mathematical physicists whose work has lain mainly in the twentieth century, the ether is regarded with suspicion, or even with contempt. And some of the opponents go so far as to as to say that the nineteenth century idea of the ether has failed to establish itself, and that in consequence the whole idea of the ether is under a cloud, and that it is only upheld by a few antiquated supporters, who, though are willing to admit many modifications in the original nineteenth century notions of an ether, feel the need of a medium capable of performing the functions attributed to it.

Oliver Lodge
All potential energy exists in the ether. It may vibrate, and it may rotate, but as regards locomotion it is stationary—the most stationary body we know: absolutely stationary, so to speak; our standard of rest.

Oliver Lodge
The first thing to realise about the Ether is its absolute continuity.

Oliver Lodge
But although life is not energy, any more than it is matter, yet it directs energy and thereby controls arrangements of matter.

Oliver Lodge
A physical theory cannot take the whole universe into account; but if it is to be complete enough to be satisfactory, and to make trustworthy predictions, it must take all relevant factors into account.

Oliver Lodge
There seems to be a regular gradation of size [of cosmic matter], therefore, ranging from Sirius to dust; and apparently we must regard all space as full of these cosmic particles-stray fragments, as it were, perhaps of some older world, perhaps going to help to form a new one someday.

Oliver Lodge
The oldest and best known function for an ether is the conveyance of light, and hence the name "luminiferous" was applied to it, though at the present day many functions are known, and more will almost certainly be discovered.

Oliver Lodge
There is a conservation of matter and of energy, there may be a conservation of life; or if not of life, of something which transcends life.

Oliver Lodge
I have made no secret of my conviction, not merely that personality persists, but that its continued existence is more entwined with the life of every day than has been generally imagined; that there is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living; and that methods of intercommunion across what has been deemed a gulf can be set going in response to the urgent demand of affection,—that in fact as Diotima told Socrates (Symposium, 202 and 203), Love bridges the chasm.

Oliver Lodge
Our memories are thronged with the past; our anticipations range over the future; and it is in the past and the future that we really live. It is so even with the higher animals: they too order their lives by memory and anticipation.

Oliver Lodge
Electrons have come into existence somehow. The subject of origins usually lies outside science.

Oliver Lodge
The things to be investigated are either true or false. If false, pertinacious inquiry will reveal their falsity. If true, they are profoundly important. For there are no half-truths in Nature; every smallest departure has portentous consequences; our eyes must open slowly, or we should be overwhelmed.

Oliver Lodge
Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is. We change our state at birth, and come into the world of air and sense and myriad existence; we change our state at death and enter a region of—what?

Oliver Lodge
When a thing behaves as if it were alive, physics loses interest in it and hands it over to another section; for it is incompetent to deal with motions attributable to spontaneity and free will.

Oliver Lodge
Every great revelation is likely to have been foreshadowed in more or less imperfect forms, so as to prepare our minds and make ready the way for complete perception hereafter. It is probable that the human race is quite incompetent to receive a really great idea the first time it is offered.

Oliver Lodge