In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.
I have looked into the most philosophical systems and have found none that will not work without God.
The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.
Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.
Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.
In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data.
It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state.
The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.
Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.
Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of electromagnetism.
I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.
All the mathematical sciences are founded on the relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.
The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?
The chief philosophical value of physics is that it gives the mind something distinct to lay hold of, which, if you don’t, Nature at once tells you you are wrong.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.
The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds.
Colour as perceived by us is a function of three independent variables at least three are I think sufficient, but time will show if I thrive.