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
To suppose that we know and understand the universe, to suppose that we have grasped its main outlines, that we realise pretty completely not only what is in it, but the still more stupendous problem of what is not and cannot be in it.

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
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
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
What properties are essential to a medium capable of transmitting wave motion? Roughly, we may say two: elasticity and inertia.

Oliver Lodge
In regions where our ignorance is great, occasional guesses are permissible.

Oliver Lodge
The stars are suns, and are most likely surrounded by planets. One planet belonging to Sirius has been discovered. It was predicted by Bessel, its position calculated by Peters, and seen by Alvan Clark in 1862. Another predicted one, belonging to Procyon, has not yet been seen.

Oliver Lodge
The ordinary run of men live among phenomena of which they know nothing and care less. They see bodies fall to the earth, they hear sounds, they kindle fires, they see the heavens roll above them, but of the causes and inner working of the whole they are ignorant, and with their ignorance they are content.

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
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
All we know at present of locomotion is the locomotion of one piece of matter with reference to other pieces. That can be freely granted, and the whole edifice of physics is consistent with the idea that locomotion through the ether is impossible to measure. But the impossibility has never been proved, and some day an exceptional phenomenon may be found.

Oliver Lodge
It is rather remarkable that the majority of learned men have closed their minds to what seemed bare and simple facts to many people.

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
Microscopic organisms may have troublesome and destructive effects, but in themselves they can be be studied with interest and avidity.

Oliver Lodge
The Universe is huge and awful every way, we might so easily be crushed by it; we need the help of every agency available, and if we had no helpers we should stand a poor chance. The loneliness of it when we leave the planet would be appalling; sometimes even here the loneliness is great.

Oliver Lodge
His [Tycho Brahae] theories were poor, but his observations were admirable.

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

Oliver Lodge
The amount of sophistication varies according to the quality of the medium, and to the state of the same medium at different times; it must be attributed in the best cases physiologically to the medium, intellectually to the control.

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
The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge.

Oliver Lodge
There is no instrument for measuring the pressure of the Ether, which is probably millions of times greater: it is altogether too uniform for direct apprehension. A deep-sea fish has probably no means of apprehending the existence of water, it is too uniformly immersed in it: and that is our condition in regard to the Ether.

Oliver Lodge
The conception of Godhead formed by some devout philosophers and mystics has quite rightly been so immeasurably vast, though still assuredly utterly inadequate and necessarily beneath reality, that the notion of a God revealed in human formborn, sufferin.

Oliver Lodge