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.
When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.
To live among friends is the primary essential of happiness.
Ether is the only substance we are confident of in dynamics. One thing we are sure of and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminferous ether.
I have not had a moment’s peace or happiness in respect to electromagnetic theory since November 28, 1846. All this time I have been liable to fits of ether dipsomania, kept away at intervals only by rigorous abstention from thought on the subject.
There is nothing in science which teaches the origin of anything at all.
Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.
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.
Do not imagine that mathematics is harsh and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealisation of common sense.
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.
I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning, or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we heard of. So you will understand that I would not care to be a member of the Aeronautical Society.
There cannot be a greater mistake than that of looking superciliously upon practical applications of science. The life and soul of science is its practical application...
Science is bound, by the everlasting vow of honour, to face fearlessly every problem which can be fairly presented to it.
I have no satisfaction in formulas unless I feel their numerical magnitude.
I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.
You know only insofar as you can measure.
Fourier’s theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics.
I can never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model, I can understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way through I cannot understand.
Although mechanical energy is indestructible, there is a universal tendency to its dissipation, which produces throughout the system a gradual augmentation and diffusion of heat, cessation of motion and exhaustion of the potential energy of the material Universe.
If we can’t express what we know in the form of numbers, we really don’t know much about it.
At what time does the dissipation of energy begin?