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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.
James Jeans -
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.
James Jeans
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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.
James Jeans -
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.
James Jeans -
And the substance out of which this bubble is blown, the soap-film, is empty space welded onto empty time.
James Jeans -
One must stand stiller than still.
James Jeans -
To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
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.
James Jeans
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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.
James Jeans -
The plain fact is that there are no conclusions.
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.
James Jeans -
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.
James Jeans -
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.
James Jeans -
...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...
James Jeans
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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.
James Jeans -
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.
James Jeans -
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
James Jeans -
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.
James Jeans -
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.
James Jeans -
...experimental physics was particularly interested in the processes taking place inside the atom, and in this field the classical mechanics was failing conspicuously and completely. Perhaps its most spectacular failure was with the fundamental problem with the structure of the atom.
James Jeans