Percy Williams Bridgman Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

Our conviction that nature is understandable and subject to law arose from the narrowness of our horizons, and that if we sufficiently extend our range we shall find that nature is intrinsically and in its elements neither understandable nor subject to law.

Percy Williams Bridgman
Science is intelligence in action with no holds barred.

Percy Williams Bridgman
It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

Percy Williams Bridgman
As at present constructed, mathematics reminds one of the loquacious and not always coherent orator, who was said to be able to set his mouth going and go off and leave it.

Percy Williams Bridgman
Chance has no meaning except in the setting of order.

Percy Williams Bridgman
Freedom from superstition is the result of the conviction that the world is not governed by caprice, but that it is a world of order and can be understood by man if he will only try hard enough and be clever enough.

Percy Williams Bridgman
Einstein, in thus analyzing what is involved in making a judgment of simultaneity, and in seizing on the act of the observer as the essence of the situation, is actually adopting a new point of view as to what the concepts of physics should be, namely, the operational view.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The fact has always been for the physicist the one ultimate thing from which there is no appeal, and in the face of which the only possible attitude is a humility almost religious.

Percy Williams Bridgman
But in no case is there any question of time flowing backward, and in fact the concept of backward flow of time seems absolutely meaningless...If it were found that the entropy of the universe were decreasing, would one say that time was flowing backward, or would one say that it was a law of nature that entropy decreases with time?

Percy Williams Bridgman
Not only do we use instruments to give us fineness of detail inaccessible to direct sense perception, but we also use them to extend qualitatively the range of our senses into regions where our senses no longer operate...

Percy Williams Bridgman
I for one am not willing to admit that a man has been liberally educated for a free society who has not learned to view instinctively the doings of men against the background of the potentialities of the future rather than of the incoherencies of the past.

Percy Williams Bridgman
It seems to me that in any operational view of the meaning of natural concepts the notion of time must be used as a primitive concept, which cannot be analysed but must be accepted, so that it is meaningless to speak of a reversal of the direction of time.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The explanatory crisis which now confronts us in relativity and quantum phenomena is but a repetition of what has occurred many times in the past... Every kitten is confronted with such a crisis at the end of nine days.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts toward science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion; but at the mention of a name like Edison he falls into a coma of veneration.

Percy Williams Bridgman
My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the articles in the Encyclopaedia, is that it must be public.

Percy Williams Bridgman
Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The laws of thermodynamics have a different feel from most of the other laws of the physicist... they smell more of their human origin.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The scientific method, as far as it is a method, is nothing more than doing one's damnedest with one's mind, no holds barred.

Percy Williams Bridgman
In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.

Percy Williams Bridgman
Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.

Percy Williams Bridgman
Every new theory as it arises believes in the flush of youth that it has the long sought goal; it sees no limits to its applicability, and believes that at last it is the fortunate theory to achieve the 'right' answer.

Percy Williams Bridgman
There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The concept of length is... fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed... The concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.

Percy Williams Bridgman
If one wants to know how many planets there are one counts them but does not ask a philosopher what is the perfect number.

Percy Williams Bridgman
If a specific question has meaning, it must be possible to find operations by which an answer may be given to it...I believe that many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The feeling of understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it any ostensibly scientific activity is as sterile as that of a high school student substituting numbers into a formula. For this reason, science, when I push the analysis back as far as I can, must be private.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The first business of a man of science is to proclaim the truth as he finds it, and let the world adjust itself as best it can to the new knowledge.

Percy Williams Bridgman
The operational approach demands that we make our reports and do our thinking in the freshest terms of which we are capable, in which we strip off the sophistications of millenia of culture and report as directly as we can on what happens.

Percy Williams Bridgman