James Jeans Quotes
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From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.
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Before the quantum theory appeared, the principle of the uniformity of nature - that like causes produce like effects - had been accepted as a universal and indisputable fact of science. As soon as the atomicity of radiation became established, this principle had to be discarded.
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Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.
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When two hypotheses are possible, we provisionally choose that which our minds adjudge to be simpler, on the supposition that this is the more likely to lead in the direction of truth. It includes as a special case the principle of Occam's razor-entia non multiplicana praeter necessitatem.
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And the substance out of which this bubble is blown, the soap-film, is empty space welded onto empty time.
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One must stand stiller than still.
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To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
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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.
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With the coming of the twentieth century, there came into being a new physics which was especially concerned with phenomenon on the atomic and sub-atomic scale. ...A preliminary glance over the vast territory of this new physics reveals three outstanding landmarks.
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An extension of Planck's ideas, due to Prof. Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, went on to suggest that... the ultimate particles of matter would be seen to move not like railway trains running smoothly on tracks, but like kangaroos hopping about in a field.
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The plain fact is that there are no conclusions.
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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.
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...a detailed mathematical discussion shows that whatever kind of wave-packet we select to represent the electron, the product of the two uncertainties of position and momentum can never be less than h, which is precisely what Heisenberg found...
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Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.
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At this time, space was supposed to be filled with an ether, a substance which might well serve, among other functions, to transmit forces across space. So long as such an ether could be called on, the transmission of force to a distance was easy to understand; it was like ringing a distant bell by pulling a bell-rope.
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We saw that radiation cannot suitably be pictured as particles when it is traveling through space. There is a corresponding property for electrons; these should not be pictured as waves so long as they are traveling through empty space.
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If we assume that the last breath of, say, Julius Caesar has by now become thoroughly scattered through the atmosphere, then the chances are that each of us inhales one molecule of it with every breath we take.
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Faraday, Maxwell, Larmor and a great number of others tried to explain electromagnetic action on these lines, but all attempts failed, and it began to seem impossible that any properties of ether could explain the observed pattern of events.
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The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
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Physics and philosophy are at most a few thousand years old, but probably have lives of thousands of millions of years stretching away in front of them. They are only just beginning to get under way...