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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.

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
Natural
Gains
Insignificance
Science
Deeper
Prospect
Nature
Questions
Sink
May
However
Priority
Persons
Concerned
Secrets
Personal
Priorities
Secret
Insight
Interesting
Gain

More quotes by Lord Kelvin

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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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Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
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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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The vortex theory [of the atom] is only a dream. Itself unproven, it can prove nothing, and any speculations founded upon it are mere dreams about dreams.
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You know only insofar as you can measure.
Lord Kelvin
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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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When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.
Lord Kelvin
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[Of the ether] it is no greater mystery at all events than the shoemakers' wax.
Lord Kelvin
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To live among friends is the primary essential of happiness.
Lord Kelvin
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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.
Lord Kelvin
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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.
Lord Kelvin
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Science is bound, by the everlasting vow of honour, to face fearlessly every problem which can be fairly presented to it.
Lord Kelvin
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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.
Lord Kelvin
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The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I do not see how I can put it in words.
Lord Kelvin
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If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.
Lord Kelvin
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I have no satisfaction in formulas unless I feel their numerical magnitude.
Lord Kelvin
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I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
Lord Kelvin
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The more thoroughly I conduct scientific research, the more I believe that science excludes atheism.
Lord Kelvin
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I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.
Lord Kelvin
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If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.
Lord Kelvin