Quote

Simplification of modes of proof is not merely an indication of advance in our knowledge of a subject, but is also the surest guarantee of readiness for farther progress.

Lord Kelvin

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Lord Kelvin
Age: 83 †
Born: 1824
Born: June 26
Died: 1907
Died: December 17
Astronomer
Mathematician
Physicist
Politician
Scientist
University Teacher
Belfast
Ireland
The Lord Kelvin
Lord Kelvin
William Thomson
William (Lord Kelvin) Thomson
Subjects
Farther
Progress
Indication
Knowledge
Guarantee
Science
Guarantees
Also
Advance
Simplification
Proof
Modes
Subject
Surest
Merely
Readiness

More quotes by Lord Kelvin

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Questions of personal priority, however interesting they may be to the persons concerned, sink into insignificance in the prospect of any gain of deeper insight into the secrets of nature.
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To live among friends is the primary essential of happiness.
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When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.
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Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results.
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I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.
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To measure is to know.
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I have no satisfaction in formulas unless I feel their numerical magnitude.
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Nothing can be more fatal to progress than a too confident reliance on mathematical symbols for the student is only too apt to take the easier course, and consider the formula not the fact as the physical reality.
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I can never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model, I can understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way through I cannot understand.
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Fourier is a mathematical poem.
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You know only insofar as you can measure.
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Vortices of pure energy can exist and, if my theories are right, can compose the bodily form of an intelligent species.
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[Of the ether] it is no greater mystery at all events than the shoemakers' wax.
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Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but ' vector ' is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.
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Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter throughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.
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Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.
Lord Kelvin
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There cannot be a greater mistake than that of looking superciliously upon practical applications of science. The life and soul of science is its practical application.
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We only know God in His works, but we are forced by science to admit and to believe with absolute confidence in a Directive Power-in an influence other than physical, or dynamical, or electrical forces.
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Can you measure it? Can you express it in figures? Can you make a model of it? If not, your theory is apt to be based more upon imagination than upon knowledge.
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If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.
Lord Kelvin