Oliver Lodge Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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
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
We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character.

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
Motion and force are our primary objects of experience and consciousness; and in terms of them all other less familiar occurrences may conceivably be studied and grasped.

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
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
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 is not the germ cell itself, but the bodily accretion or appendage, which is abandoned by life, and which accordingly, dies and decays.

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

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