The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century Quotes

“Kepler was the wildest of guessers.”

“Energy, like matter, is indestructible and ingenerable in nature.”

“Wherever motion of matter takes place, that motion is effected at the expense of part of the total store of energy.”

“The development of every branch of physical knowledge presents three stages which, in their logical relation, are successive.”

“In so far as matter may be conceived to exist in a purely passive state, it is, imaginably, older than motion.”

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“The great steps in its [science's] progress have been made, are made, and will be made, by men who seek knowledge simply because they crave for it.”

“The phenomenal world, so far as it is material, expresses the evolution and involution of energy, its passage from the kinetic to the potential condition and back again.”

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“I may hope... that my chance of escaping serious errors is as good as that of anyone else, who might have been persuaded to undertake the somewhat perilous enterprise in which I find myself engaged.”

“The geocentric system of astronomy, with its eccentrics and its epicycles, was an hypothesis utterly at variance with fact, which nevertheless did great things for the advancement of astronomical knowledge.”

“Physical science... rests on verified or uncontradicted hypotheses; and, such being the case, it is not surprising that a great condition of its progress has been the invention of verifiable hypotheses.”

“We may hope that, at last, the weary misunderstanding between the practical men who professed to despise science, and the high and dry philosophers who professed to despise practical results, is at an end.”

“Descartes was an eminent mathematician, and it would seem that the bent of his mind led him to overestimate the value of deductive reasoning from general principles, as much as Bacon had underestimated it.”

“It is largely because the chemical theory and practice of our epoch have passed into this deductive and synthetic stage, that they are entitled to the name of the 'New Chemistry' which they commonly receive.”

“Certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.”

“That a particular molecular motion does give rise to a state of consciousness is experimentally certain; but the how and why of the process are just as inexplicable as in the case of the communication of kinetic energy by impact.”

“'''Newton expressly repudiated the notion of the existence of attractive forces, in the sense in which that term is ordinarily understood; and he refused to put forward any hypothesis as to the physical cause of the so-called 'attraction of gravitation.''''”

“As the phenomena exhibited by living beings, in so far as they are material, are all molar or molecular motions, these are included under the general law [of the conservation of energy].”

“It should never be forgotten that what we call 'catastrophes,' are, in relation to the earth, changes, the equivalents of which would be well represented by the development of a few pimples, or the scratch of a pin on a man's head.”