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The chief philosophical value of physics is that it gives the mind something distinct to lay hold of, which, if you don't, Nature at once tells you you are wrong.

James Clerk Maxwell

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James Clerk Maxwell
Age: 48 †
Born: 1831
Born: June 13
Died: 1879
Died: November 5
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Mathematician
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Edinburgh
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Maxwell
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More quotes by James Clerk Maxwell

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The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.
James Clerk Maxwell
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In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy.
James Clerk Maxwell
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In your letter you apply the word imponderable to a molecule. Don't do that again. It may also be worth knowing that the aether cannot be molecular. If it were, it would be a gas, and a pint of it would have the same properties as regards heat, etc., as a pint of air, except that it would not be so heavy.
James Clerk Maxwell
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The equations at which we arrive must be such that a person of any nation, by substituting the numerical values of the quantities as measured by his own national units, would obtain a true result.
James Clerk Maxwell
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Heat may be generated and destroyed by certain processes, and this shows that heat is not a substance.
James Clerk Maxwell
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All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.
James Clerk Maxwell
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Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
James Clerk Maxwell
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The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.
James Clerk Maxwell
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The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds.
James Clerk Maxwell
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At quite uncertain times and places, The atoms left their heavenly path, And by fortuitous embraces, Engendered all that being hath. And though they seem to cling together, And form 'associations' here, Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether, And through the depths of space career.
James Clerk Maxwell
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Gin a body meet a body Flyin' through the air, Gin a body hit a body, Will it fly? and where?
James Clerk Maxwell
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Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men's hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression 'structureless germs'.
James Clerk Maxwell
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Colour as perceived by us is a function of three independent variables at least three are I think sufficient, but time will show if I thrive.
James Clerk Maxwell
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We define thermodynamics ... as the investigation of the dynamical and thermal properties of bodies, deduced entirely from the first and second law of thermodynamics, without speculation as to the molecular constitution.
James Clerk Maxwell
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We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.
James Clerk Maxwell
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Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
James Clerk Maxwell
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Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.
James Clerk Maxwell
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Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.
James Clerk Maxwell
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The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics.
James Clerk Maxwell
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Thus number may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.
James Clerk Maxwell