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James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell Quotes

Physicist

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Famous James Clerk Maxwell Quotes

“And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance, nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.”

MindHumansStillsMatterBodyLastsFormLawMoralDoubtDesignLessonsHarmonyDoctrineMathematicalSignificanceDomainCrystalsUsefulnessAnalogiesExcludedBurstingSparklingRigidityHuman KnowledgeFabricateTrigonometry
Book:The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell: 1846-1862
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“We shall see that the mathematical treatment of the subject [of electricity] has been greatly developed by writers who express themselves in terms of the 'Two Fluids' theory. Their results, however, have been deduced entirely from data which can be proved by experiment, and which must therefore be true, whether we adopt the theory of two fluids or not. The experimental verification of the mathematical results therefore is no evidence for or against the peculiar doctrines of this theory.”

Has BeensTwoTermResultsSubjectsTheoryEvidenceExperimentsDoctrineBeing TrueDataMathematicalTreatmentPeculiarElectricityFluidVerification
Book:A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
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