William Cecil Dampier Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

We can only study Nature through our senses - that is... we can only study the model of Nature that our senses enable our minds to construct; we cannot decide whether that model, consistent though it be, represents truly the real structure of Nature; whether, indeed, there be any Nature as an ultimate reality behind its phenomena.

William Cecil Dampier
Indeed the intellectual basis of all empirical knowledge may be said to be a matter of probability, expressible only in terms of a bet.

William Cecil Dampier
The different sciences are not even parts of a whole; they are but different aspects of a whole, which essentially has nothing in it corresponding to the divisions we make; they are, so to speak, sections of our model of Nature in certain arbitrary planes, cut in directions to suit our convenience.

William Cecil Dampier
A false hypothesis, if it serve as a guide for further enquiry, may, at the right stage of science, be as useful as, or more useful than, a truer one for which acceptable evidence is not yet at hand.

William Cecil Dampier
Great discoveries are made accidentally less often than the populace likes to think.
Commenting on how an accident led to the discovery of X-rays..

William Cecil Dampier
The mind of man, learning consciously and unconsciously lessons of experience, gradually constructs a mental image of its surroundings - as the mariner draws a chart of strange coasts to guide him in future voyages, and to enable those that follow after him to sail the same seas with ease and safety.

William Cecil Dampier
There was a young man who said, "God To you it must seem very odd That a tree as a tree simply ceases to be When there's no one about in the Quad."... Young man, your astonishment's odd, I am always about in the Quad And that's why the tree continues to be As observed by, Yours faithfully, God.

William Cecil Dampier
The fundamental concepts of physical science, it is now understood, are abstractions, framed by our mind, so as to bring order to an apparent chaos of phenomena.

William Cecil Dampier
Confronted with the mystery of the Universe, we are driven to ask if the model our minds have framed at all corresponds with the reality; if, indeed, there be any reality behind the image.

William Cecil Dampier
It seemed as though the main framework had been put together once and for all, and that little remained to be done but to measure physical constants to the increased accuracy represented by another decimal point.

William Cecil Dampier
Mathematics is but the higher development of symbolic logic.

William Cecil Dampier
But beyond the bright searchlights of science, Out of sight of the windows of sense, Old riddles still bid us defiance, Old questions of Why and of Whence.

William Cecil Dampier
Whether we look inwards or outwards the complexity of Nature seems boundless: "Boundless inward in the atom; boundless outward in the whole."

William Cecil Dampier
The physicist analyzes matter into particles, and finds that their forces and motions can be described in mathematical terms. The materialist pushes this scientific result into philosophy, and says that there is no other reality.

William Cecil Dampier
Sometimes the probability in favor of a generalization is enormous, but the infinite probability of certainty is never reached.

William Cecil Dampier
The more we learn, the more various and intricate are the new avenues of research which open before us.

William Cecil Dampier
Life... may be regarded either as a negligible accident in a bye-product of the cosmic process, or as the supreme manifestation of the high effort of creative evolution, for which the Earth alone, in the chances of time and space, has given a fitting home.

William Cecil Dampier