Percy Williams Bridgman - The Logic of Modern Physics (1927)

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

Percy Williams Bridgman