There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he...

…But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much...

As every circumstance relating to so capital a discovery as this (the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure...

Newton’s work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right...

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him...

Newton supposed that the case of the planet was similar to that of [a ball spun around on the end of an elastic string]; that it was always pulled in the direction of the sun,...

… for it is very probable, that the motion of gravity worketh weakly, both far from the earth, and also within the earth: the former because the appetite of union of dense bodies with the...

I “love” reading.It makes me feel like I am swallowing up Christ, Homer, Confucius, Newton, Franklin, Socrates, Caesar, and the whole world into one gigantic invincible Sir Moffat. Mine is creative reading. I read building...

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

From one sublime genius—NEWTON—more light has proceeded than the labour of a thousand years preceding had been able to produce.

…The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to...

In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears...

the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was...

Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton’s time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true...

There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, … the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its...

Foreshadowings of the principles and even of the language of [the infinitesimal] calculus can be found in the writings of Napier, Kepler, Cavalieri, Fermat, Wallis, and Barrow. It was Newton’s good luck to come at...

For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus; for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed,...

If you’ve managed to do one good thing,the ocean doesn’t care.But when Newton’s applefell toward the earth,the earth, ever so slightly, felltoward the apple as well.

It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul’s Cathedral...

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to...

Science would not be what it is if there had not been a Galileo, a Newton or a Lavoisier, any more than music would be what it is if Bach, Beethoven and Wagner had never...

What a deep [trust] in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in...

Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied ‘Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit.

If you can’t illustrate ‘it’, ‘it’ doens’t belong in Physics as a noun! You can’t put an article in front. You can’t put a verb after!

This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.{Referring to James Clerk Maxwell’s contributions to physics}

Lo que sabemos es una gota de agua; lo que ignoramos es un océano.

From a philosophical point of view, Leibniz’s most interesting argument was that absolute space conflicted with what he called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). PII says that if two objects are indiscernible,...

I esteem his understanding and subtlety highly, but I consider that they have been put to ill use in the greater part of his work, where the author studies things of little use…{Writing about Isaac...

Those whom nature destined to make her disciples have no need of teachers. Bacon, Descartes, Newton — these tutors of the human race had no need of tutors themselves, and what guides could have led...

[All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to...

I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind as to send me on the Literature of Negroes. Be assured that no person living...

His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it’s done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period...

The Dome.” Perfectly round, this room is one continuous curved wall of books. A copper dome sits on top with four stained glass windows fitted tight to allow for natural light to stream in. The...

Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than...

Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.{Franklin’s edit to the assertion in Thomas Jefferson’s original wording, ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable’ in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it...

Things that look like they were designed, probably were… If intelligence is an operative component of the universe, a science that methodologically excludes its existence will be susceptible to being trapped in an endless chase...

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of...

A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.I was...

The reason Dick’s physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing...

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

Force,” they make a barber’s block,Ready to put onMeanings most strange and various, fit to shockPupils of Newton….The phrases of last century in thisLinger to play tricks—Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:—Those long-nebbed...

Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire, 1642: a weakly and diminutive infant, of whom it is related that, at his birth, he might have found room in a quart mug. He...

Physical reality does not require that we be pleased with its mechanism.