Great Physicists Quotes

“He had the idea, which he could see confirmed in the evidence of electrochemistry, that when two electrically charged bodies influence each other the effect depends not only on the charge itself but also on the medium between the two bodies. He designed a device called a “capacitor” in modern terminology. It consisted of two concentric brass spheres separated electrically by shellac insulation.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“But, like many of his contemporaries, he had reservations about atomism: “I must confess I am jealous of the term atom; for though it is very easy to talk of atoms, it is very difficult to form a clear idea of their nature, especially when compound bodies are under consideration.” With the gift of hindsight, we wonder why Faraday was not bold enough to believe in charged atoms, and even in an atom of electricity (the electron). This was a step he could not take because it violated his dictum that a postulate is not a truth unless it has the support of (many) experimental facts. Nothing was more important to Faraday than that.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through his high-discipline he converted the fire into a central glow and motive force of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“Thomson particularly admired Fourier’s agnostic theoretical method, based on mathematical models that were useful but at the same time noncommittal on the difficult question of the nature of heat.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“For Joule “the study of nature and her laws” was “essentially a holy undertaking.” He could summon the monumental patience required to assess minute errors in a prolonged series of measurements, and at the same time transcend the details and see his work as a quest “for acquaintance with natural laws ... no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.” Great theorists have sometimes had thoughts of this kind—one might get the same meaning from Albert Einstein’s remark that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility”—but experimentalists, whose lives are taken up with the apparently mundane tasks of reading instruments and designing apparatuses, have rarely felt that they were communicating with the “mind of God.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“His first determination, in 1843, of the mechanical equivalent of heat was ignored, and subsequent determinations were given little attention until Thomson and Stokes took notice at the British Association meeting in 1847.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“Joule wrote later in his autobiographical note, “Dalton possessed a rare power of engaging the affection of his pupils for scientific truth; and it was from his instruction that I first formed a desire to increase my knowledge by original researches.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“The gifted student who has studied under a great teacher would almost certainly adopt a less independent tone in his first papers, because he would have the attitude of a pupil to his senior, besides a deference due to appreciation of his senior’s achievements. A student without deference after distinguished tuition is almost always mediocre.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“His early researches were pursued partly in the spirit of a young gentleman’s entertainment, which happened to be science instead of fighting or politics or gambling.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“He was the first to understand that unambiguous equivalence principles could be obtained only with the most inspired attention to experimental accuracy.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“On one assessment there should be no doubt: Newton was the greatest creative genius physics has ever seen. None of the other candidates for the superlative (Einstein, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and Feynman) has matched Newton’s combined achievements as theoretician, experimentalist, and mathematician.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“It is a striking fact that the history of each science shows continuity back to its first use of measurement, before which it exhibits no ancestry but metaphysics.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“work was his restorative.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“Only a few of Newton’s contemporaries read the Principia with comprehension, and following generations chose to translate it into a more transparent, if less elegant, combination of algebra and the Newton-Leibniz calculus.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“I keep [a] subject constantly before me,” Newton once remarked, “and wait ’till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“They gave us the rules of the game and the durable conviction that the physical world is comprehensible.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“Church doctrine had it otherwise: Earth was at the center. The conflict between Galileo’s telescope and Church dogma brought disaster to Galileo, but in the end the telescope prevailed, and the dramatic story of the confrontation taught Galileo’s most important lesson.”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

“I do not even know what a matrix is,” Heisenberg complained to Jordan. As”
― William H. Cropper, Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking