William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

Accurate and minute measurement seems to the nonscientific imagination a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long contained labor in the minute sifting of numerical results.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Forty years ago I asked Liebig walking somewhere in the country, if he believed that the grass and flowers which we saw around us grew by mere chemical forces; he answered, "NO, no more than I could believe that a book of botany describing them grew by mere chemical force."

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
I want to understand light as well as I can, without introducing things that we understand even less of. That is why I take plain dynamics. I can get a model in plain dynamics; I cannot in electromagnetics.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Nothing can be more fatal to progress than a too confident reliance on mathematical symbols; for the student is only too apt to take the easier course, and consider the formula not the fact as the physical reality.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Science is bound by the everlasting law of honour, to face fearlessly every problem which can fairly be presented to it. If a probable solution, consistent with the ordinary course of nature, can be found, we must not involve the abnormal act of Creative Power.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
A scientific theory is a tool and not a creed.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Some people say they cannot understand a million million. Those people cannot understand that twice two makes four. That is the way I put it to people who talk to me about the incomprehensibility of such large numbers. I say finitude is incomprehensible, the infinite in the universe is comprehensible.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
All these reckonings of the history of underground heat, the details of which I am sure you do not wish me to put before you at present, are founded on the very sure assumption that the material of our present solid earth all round its surface was at one time a white-hot liquid.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
These somewhat pedantic words are justifiable, because "infinitesimal satellite" is nine syllables to express three or four sentences; that is our justification.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perseveringly during fifty-five years, and that word is failure. Lord Kelvin's Jubilee

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
When you call a thing mysterious, all that means is that you don't understand it.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Life proceeds from life, and from nothing but life.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Paradoxes have no place in science. Their removal is the substitution of true for false statements and thoughts.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
I never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model, I understand it.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Fourier's Theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
All that is shown to the eye; and one of the most beautiful results of mathematics is the means of showing to the eye the law of variation, however complicated, of one independent variable.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
The scientific man sees and feels beauty as much as any mere observer — as much as any artist or painter. But he also sees something underlying that beauty; he wishes to learn something of the actions and forces producing those beautiful results.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
The stream lines are as represented in the annexed diagram, in which the region of translational velocity greater than wave-propagational velocity is separated from the region of translational velocity less than wave-propagational velocity by a cat's-eye border pattern of elliptic-whirls.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
There must be something in this molecular hypothesis and that as a mechanical symbol it is certainly not a mere hypothesis, but a reality.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
There is... one thing I feel strongly in respect to investigation in physical or chemical laboratories — it leaves no room for shady, doubtful distinctions between truth, half-truth, whole falsehood. In the laboratory everything tested or tried is found true or not.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Every process has laws, known or unknown, according to which it must take place. A consciousness of them is so far from being necessary to the process, that we cannot discover what they are, except by analyzing the results it has left us.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Let us then hear no more nonsense about the interference of mathematicians in matters with which they have no concern; rather let them be lauded for condescending from their proud preeminence to help out of a rut the too ponderous wagon of some scientific brother.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
A single curve, drawn in the manner of the curve of prices of cotton, describes all that the ear can possibly hear as a result of the most complicated musical performances.... That to my mind is a wonderful proof of the potency of mathematics.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Questions of personal priority... however interesting they may be to the persons concerned, sink into insignificance in the prospect of any gain of deeper insight into the secrets of nature.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin