Percy Williams Bridgman - Reflections of a Physicist (1950)

10 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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