Reply
Mon 18 Jan, 2010 01:27 am
Science Quotes by Sir James Jeans
...[T]o many it is not knowledge but the quest for knowledge that gives greater interest to thought-to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
- Sir James Jeans
Last sentences, Physics and Philosophy (1943, 1981), 217
Humanity is at the very beginning of its existence-a new-born babe, with all the unexplored potentialities of babyhood; and until the last few moments its interest has been centred, absolutely and exclusively, on its cradle and feeding bottle.
- Sir James Jeans
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.
- Sir James Jeans
The Mysterious Universe (1930),
Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.
- Sir James Jeans
Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.
- Sir James Jeans
Sciences usually advances by a succession of small steps, through a fog in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts, an eminence is gained, and a wider stretch of territory can be surveyed-sometimes with startling results.
A whole science may then seem to undergo a kaleidoscopic rearrangement, fragments of knowledge sometimes being found to fit together in a hitherto unsuspected manner. Sometimes the shock of readjustment may spread to other sciences; sometimes it may divert the whole current of human thought.
- Sir James Jeans
Taking a very gloomy view of the future of the human race, let us suppose that it can only expect to survive for two thousand millions years longer, a period about equal to the past age of the earth. Then, regarded as a being destined to live for three-score years and ten, humanity although it has been born in a house seventy years old, is itself only three days old.
But only in the last few minutes has it become conscious that the whole world does not centre round its cradle and its trappings, and only in the last few ticks of the clock has any adequate conception of the size of the external world dawned upon it. For our clock does not tick seconds, but years; its minutes are the lives of men.
- Sir James Jeans
The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means.
- Sir James Jeans
The motion of the stars over our heads is as much an illusion as that of the cows, trees and churches that flash past the windows of our train.
- Sir James Jeans
The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot.
- Sir James Jeans
The stream of human knowledge is impartially heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm.
- Sir James Jeans
The Mysterious Universe (1930), chapter 5.
The tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole material universe into waves, and nothing but waves. These waves are of two kinds: bottled-up waves, which we call matter, and unbottled waves, which we call radiation or light. If annihilation of matter occurs, the process is merely that of unbottling imprisoned wave-energy and setting it free to travel through space. These concepts reduce the whole universe to a world of light, potential or existent, so that the whole story of its creation can be told with perfect accuracy and completeness in the six words: 'God said, Let there be light'.
- Sir James Jeans
We have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.
- Sir James Jeans
The Mysterious Universe (1930), 134.
We may reflect that physics and philosophy are at most a few thousand years old, but probably have lives of thousands of millions of years stretching in front of them.
- Sir James Jeans
Physics and Philosophy (1943, 1981), 217
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace