List of James Jeans Quotes

Kant, Discussing The Various Modes Of Perception By Which The Human Mind Apprehends Nature, Concluded That It Is Specially Prone To See Nature Through Mathematical Spectacles. Just As A Man Wearing Blue Spectacles Would See Only A Blue World, So Kant Thought That, With Our Mental Bias, We Tend To See Only A Mathematical World.

One Must Stand Stiller Than Still. On Reverse Time Travel.

...nature Seems Very Conversant With The Rules Of Pure Mathematics, As Our Own Mathematicians Have Formulated Them In Their Studies, Out Of Their Own Inner Consciousness And Without Drawing To Any Appreciable Extent On Their Experience Of The Outer World.

All Discussion Of The Ultimate Nature Of Things Must Necessarily Be Barren Unless We Have Some Extraneous Standards Against Which To Compare Them.

We May As Well Cut Out Group Theory. That Is A Subject That Will Never Be Of Any Use In Physics.

The Plain Fact Is That There Are No Conclusions. If We Must State A Conclusion, It Would Be That Many Of The Former Conclusions Of The Nineteenth-century Science On Philosophical Questions Are Once Again In The Melting-pot.

...to Many It Is Not Knowledge But The Quest For Knowledge That Gives Greater Interest To Thought-to Travel Hopefully Is Better Than To Arrive.

Humanity Is At The Very Beginning Of Its Existence-a New-born Babe, With All The Unexplored Potentialities Of Babyhood; And Until The Last Few Moments Its Interest Has Been Centred, Absolutely And Exclusively, On Its Cradle And Feeding Bottle.

In This Model, The Sun Is A Very Tiny Speck Of Dust Indeed-a Speck Less Than A Three-thousandth Of An Inch In Diameter ... Think Of The Sun As Something Less Than A Speck Of Dust In A Vast City, Of The Earth As Less Than A Millionth Part Of Such A Speck Of Dust, And We Have Perhaps As Vivid A Picture As The Mind Can Really Grasp Of The Relation Of Our Home In Space To The Rest Of The Universe.

Sciences Usually Advances By A Succession Of Small Steps, Through A Fog In Which Even The Most Keen-sighted Explorer Can Seldom See More Than A Few Paces Ahead. Occasionally The Fog Lifts, An Eminence Is Gained, And A Wider Stretch Of Territory Can Be Surveyed-sometimes With Startling Results. A Whole Science May Then Seem To Undergo A Kaleidoscopic Rearrangement, Fragments Of Knowledge Sometimes Being Found To Fit Together In A Hitherto Unsuspected Manner. Sometimes The Shock Of Readjustment May Spread To Other Sciences; Sometimes It May Divert The Whole Current Of Human Thought.

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.

In Real Science A Hypothesis Can Never Be Proved True...a Science Which Confines Itself To Correlating Phenomena Can Never Learn Anything About The Reality Underlying The Phenomena, While A Science Which Goes Further Than This And Introduces Hypotheses About Reality, Can Never Acquire Certain Knowledge Of A Positive Kind About Reality; In Whatever Way We Proceed, This Is Forever Denied Us.