We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because ‘two’ is ‘one and one.’ We forget that we still have to make a study of ‘and.’
There was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. The question was never answered. No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron; it belongs to the waiting list.
Schrodinger’s wave-mechanics is not a physical theory but a dodge-and a very good dodge too.
When an investigator has developed a formula which gives a complete representation of the phenomena within a certain range, he may be prone to satisfaction. Would it not be wiser if he should say ‘Foiled again! I can find out no more about Nature along this line.’
The helium which we handle must have been put together at some time and some place. We do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place.
The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world.
There is no space without aether, and no aether which does not occupy space.
Our ultimate analysis of space leads us not to a “here” and a “there,” but to an extension such as that which relates “here” and “there.” To put the conclusion rather crudely-space is not a lot of points close together; it is a lot of distances interlocked.
What we makes of the world must be largely dependent on the sense-organs that we happen to possess. How the world must have changed since the man came to rely on his eyes rather than his nose.
Falling in love is one of the activities forbidden that tiresome person, the consistently reasonable man.
I don’t believe any experiment until it is confirmed by theory. I find this is a witty inversion of “conventional” wisdom.
If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of nature, time occupies the key position.
What is possible in the Cavendish Laboratory may not be too difficult in the sun.
Don’t believe the results of experiments until they’re confirmed by theory.
It is a primitive form of thought that things exist or do not exist.
For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.
Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.
So far as physics is concerned, time’s arrow is a property of entropy alone.
It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.