William Thomson Short Quotes

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A scientific theory is a tool and not a creed.

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

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
To live among friends is the primary essential of happiness.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
I have no satisfaction in formulas unless I feel their arithmetical magnitude.

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
One thing we are sure of... and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
There is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissipation of mechanical energy.

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
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

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
It is impossible for a self-acting machine, unaided by any external agency, to convey heat from one body to another at a higher temperature.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of sound speculation in dynamical science.

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
Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but 'vector' is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Simplification of modes of proof is not merely an indication of advance in our knowledge of a subject, but is also the surest guarantee of readiness for farther progress.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way.

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

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
The hypothesis that life originated on this earth through moss-grown fragments from the ruins of another world may seem wild and visionary; all I maintain is that it is not unscientific.

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
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
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
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