Georg C. Lichtenberg
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenbergwas a German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the strange tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth1 July 1742
CountryGermany
It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.
A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.
People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.
A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.
Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
Some men come by the name of genius in the same way as an insect comes by the name of centipede - not because it has a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen
It thunders, howls, roars, hisses, whistles, blusters, hums, growls, rumbles, squeaks, groans, sings, crackles, cracks, rattles, flickers, clicks, snarls, tumbles, whimpers, whines, rustles, murmurs, crashes, clucks, to gurgle, tinkles, blows, snores, claps, to lisp, to cough, it boils, to scream, to weep, to sob, to croak, to stutter, to lisp, to coo, to breathe, to clash, to bleat, to neigh, to grumble, to scrape, to bubble. These words, and others like them, which express sounds are more than mere symbols: they are a kind of hieroglyphics for the ear.