Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.
If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.
Can you measure it? Can you express it in figures? Can you make a model of it? If not, your theory is apt to be based more upon imagination than upon knowledge.
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
To measure is to know.
Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance can be tolerated only in race horses and fancy women.
When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery.
The fact that mathematics does such a good job of describing the Universe is a mystery that we don’t understand. And a debt that we will probably never be able to repay.
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.
In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.
Fourier is a mathematical poem.
The more thoroughly I conduct scientific research, the more I believe that science excludes atheism.
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.
Let nobody be afraid of true freedom of thought. Let us be free in thought and criticism; but, with freedom, we are bound to come to the conclusion that science is not antagonistic to religion, but a help to it.
The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I do not see how I can put it in words.
Vortices of pure energy can exist and, if my theories are right, can compose the bodily form of an intelligent species.
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.
The only census of the senses, so far as I am aware, that ever before made them more than five, was the Irishman’s reckoning of seven senses. I presume the Irishman’s seventh sense was common sense; and I believe that the possession of that virtue by my countrymen-I speak as an Irishman.