Science Quotes - Page 34

• This investigation has yielded an unanticipated result that reaction of cyanic acid with ammonia gives urea, a noteworthy result in as much as it provides an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal, substance from inorganic substances.

  Friedrich Wohler

  Animal, Discovery, Giving

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• This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequalities.

  Urbain Le Verrier

  Distance, Fall, Discovery

  "The Planet Neptune: An Exposition and History". Book by John Pringle Nichol, 1848.

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• To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.

  Abraham Pais

  Discovery, Understanding

  "Inward Bound : Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World" by Abraham Pais, (p. 134), 1988.

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• When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backwards and forwards, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing?

  Hermann von Helmholtz

  Time, Ocean, Mean

  Hermann von Helmholtz, David Cahan (1995). “Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays”, p.93, University of Chicago Press

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• Like Molière's M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic.

  Ernest Nagel

  Nature, Real, Two

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• Linnaeus had it constantly in mind:'The closer we get to know the creatures around us, the clearer is the understanding we obtain of the chain of nature, and its harmony and system, according to which all things appear to have been created.'

  Sten Lindroth

  Nature, Understanding, Mind

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• Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.

  Hideki Yukawa

  Nature, Lines, Natural

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• Nature is as it is because this is the only possible nature consistent with itself.

  Geoffrey Chew

  Nature, Natural, Consistent

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• Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows tracings of her workings apart from the beaten paths; nor is there any better way to advance the proper practice of medicine than to give our minds to the discovery of the usual law of nature, by careful investigation of cases of rarer forms of disease.

  William Harvey

  Nature, Practice Of Medicine, Discovery

  1987 Making It Happen: Reflections on Leadership.

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• Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.

  Chen-Ning Yang

  Beautiful, Nature, Simple

  Chen Ning Yang (2013). “Selected Papers of Chen Ning Yang II: With Commentaries”, p.260, World Scientific

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• Nothing is sudden in nature: whereas the slightest storms are forecasted several days in advance, the destruction of the world must have been announced several years beforehand by heat waves, by winds, by meteorites, in short, by an infinity of phenomena.

  Nicolas Antoine Boulanger

  Nature, Years, Wind

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• Science has penetrated the constitution of nature, and unrolled the mysterious pages of its history, and started again many, as yet, unanswered questions in respect to the mutual relations of matter and spirit, of nature and of God.

  Noah Porter

  Nature, History, Unanswered Questions

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• Some may claim that is it unscientific to speak of the operations of nature as "miracles." But the point of the title lies in the paradox of finding so many wonderful things ... subservient to the rule of law.

  Elisha Gray

  Nature, Lying, Law

  Elisha Gray (1899). “Nature's Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science”

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• The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world-the hardware-plays the role of a gigantic computer.

  Paul Davies

  Nature, Views, Law

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• The disease and its medicine are like two factions in a besieged town; they tear one another to pieces, but both unite against their common enemy, Nature.

  Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey

  Nature, Two, Medicine

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• The doctor is the servant and the interpreter of nature. Whatever he thinks or does, if he follows not in nature's footsteps he will never be able to control her.

  Giorgio Baglivi

  Nature, Thinking, Doctors

  Introduction to De Praxi Medica (1696)

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• The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. Infinitely varied in its effects, nature is simple only in its causes, and its economy consists in producing a great number of phenomena, often very complicated, by means of a small number of general laws.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Nature, Mean, Simple

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• The veneration, wherewith Men are imbued for what they call Nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the Empire of Man over the inferior Creatures of God. For many have not only look'd upon it, as an impossible thing to compass, but as something impious to attempt.

  Robert Boyle

  Nature, Men, Impossible Things

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• The world is very complicated and it is clearly impossible for the human mind to understand it completely. Man has therefore devised an artifice which permits the complicated nature of the world to be blamed on something which is called accidental and thus permits him to abstract a domain in which simple laws can be found.

  Eugene Wigner

  Nature, Simple, Men

  Eugene Paul Wigner (2012). “Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.283, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Thurst [thrust] out nature with a croche [crook], yet woll she styll runne back agayne.

  Richard Taverner

  Nature, Crooks, Natural

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• Time is in itself [not] a difficulty, but a time-rate, assumed on very insufficient grounds, is used as a master-key, whether or not it fits, to unravel all difficulties. What if it were suggested that the brick-built Pyramid of Hawara had been laid brick by brick by a single workman? Given time, this would not be beyond the bounds of possibility. But Nature, like the Pharaohs, had greater forces at her command to do the work better and more expeditiously than is admitted by Uniformitarians.

  Joseph Prestwich

  Nature, Keys, Pyramids

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• What we see in history is not a transformation, a passing of one race into another, but entirely new and perfect creations, which the ever-youthful productivity of nature sends forth from the invisible realm of Hades.

  Adolf Bastian

  Nature, Race, History

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• Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

  Philip Warren Anderson

  Nature, Attitude, Reality

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• ...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.

  Paul Halmos

  Essence, Special, Example

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• All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Beauty, Art, Nature

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