The Science of Mechanics Quotes
Histories, Philosophical works, Physics books
Top Quotes
“History of science”
“Classical mechanics”
“History of mathematics”
“[W]e are not restricted to any one definite measure, all being interconnected.”
“[A]ll things in the world are connected with one another and depend on one another, and...we... and all our thoughts are... a part of nature.”
“The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.”
“Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung (1883) Ernst Mach, 1st German edition.”
“Newton never, despite his profound religiosity, mingled theology with the questions of science. ...The same may be said of Galileo and Huygens.”
“In fact, science can accomplish nothing by the consideration of individual facts; from time to time it must cast its glance at the world as a whole.”
“The Science of Mechanics (1893) Tr. Thomas Joseph McCormack, Open Court Publishing Company,*oogle Books”
“It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of the changes of things...”
“During the entire sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, down to the close of the eighteenth, the prevailing inclination of inquirers was, to find in all physical laws some particular disposition of the Creator.”
“But now, after a century has elapsed, after our judgment has grown more sober, the world-conception of the encyclopaedists appears to us as a mechanical mythology in contrast to the animistic of the old religions.”
“That branch of physics which is at once the oldest and the simplest and which is therefore as introductory to other departments of this science, is concerned with the motions and equilibrium masses. It bears the name of mechanics.”
“The history of the development of mechanics, is... indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example of the processes by which natural science generally is developed.”
“Newton... [with respect to "Absolute, true, and mathematical time... duration" and to "Relative, apparent, and commone time"] stood under the influence of the view of mediæval philosophy, as though he had grown unfaithful to his resolve to investigate only actual facts.”
“[T]he age in which the chief development of the science of mechanics took place, was an age of predominantly theological cast. Theological questions were excited by everything, and modified everything. No wonder, then, that mechanics is colored thereby.”
“An instinctive, irreflective knowledge of the processes of nature will doubtless always precede the scientific, conscious apprehension, or investigation, of phenomena. The former is the outcome of the relation in which the processes of nature stand to the satisfaction of our wants.”
“I have not in every case been able to avoid the use of the abbreviated and precise terminology of mathematics. To do so would have been to sacrifice matter to form; for the language of everyday life has not yet grown to be sufficiently accurate for the purposes of so exact a science as mechanics.”
“Time... appears to be some particular and independent thing, on the progress of which the position of the pendulum depends, while the things that we resort to for comparison and choose at random appear to play a wholly collateral part.”