The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, Volume 2 |
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Popular passages
Page 770 - 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...
Page 1053 - If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all religion. You will find it not antagonistic, but helpful to religion.
Page 603 - Careful enough scrutiny has in every case up to the present day discovered life as antecedent to life. Dead matter cannot become living without coming under the influence of matter previously alive." " This," said Sir William, " seems to me as sure a teaching of science as the law of gravitation.
Page 598 - 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.
Page 771 - There cannot be a greater mistake than that of looking superciliously upon practical applications of science. The life and soul of science is its practical application ; and just as the great advances in mathematics have been made through the desire of discovering the solution of problems which were of a highly practical kind in mathematical science, so in physical science many of the greatest advances that have been made from the beginning of the world to the present time have been made in the earnest...
Page 605 - From the earth stocked with such vegetation as it could receive meteorically, to the earth teeming with all the endless variety of plants and animals which now inhabit it, the step is prodigious; yet, according to the doctrine of continuity, most ably laid before the Association by a predecessor in this chair (Mr. Grove), all creatures now living on earth have proceeded by orderly evolution from some such origin.
Page 604 - Hence, and because we all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seedbearing meteoric stones moving about through space. If, at the present instant, no life existed upon this earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming covered with vegetation.
Page 977 - Definite and complete in its area as it is, it is but a well-drawn part of a great chart, in which all physical science will be represented with every property of matter shown in dynamical relation to the whole. The prospect we now have of an early completion of this chart is based on the assumption of atoms. But there can be no permanent satisfaction to the mind in explaining heat, light, elasticity, diffusion, electricity and magnetism, in...
Page 839 - The only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is absolute negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of life.
Page 1070 - With the feeling expressed in these two sentences I most cordially sympathize. I have omitted two sentences which come between them, describing briefly the hypothesis of " the origin of species by natural selection...