James Jeans
James Jeans
Sir James Hopwood Jeans OM FRS MA DSc ScD LLDwas an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPhysicist
Date of Birth11 September 1877
science time-travel reverse
One must stand stiller than still. On reverse time travel.
stars science past
The motion of the stars over our heads is as much an illusion as that of the cows, trees and churches that flash past the windows of our train.
philosophical science would-be
The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot.
home thinking dust
In this model, the sun is a very tiny speck of dust indeed-a speck less than a three-thousandth of an inch in diameter ... Think of the sun as something less than a speck of dust in a vast city, of the earth as less than a millionth part of such a speck of dust, and we have perhaps as vivid a picture as the mind can really grasp of the relation of our home in space to the rest of the universe.
drawing world study
...nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.
science atoms carbon
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.
mean intelligent race
The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means.
carpe-diem great-divorce charity-at-christmas
To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
real forever way
In real science a hypothesis can never be proved true...A science which confines itself to correlating phenomena can never learn anything about the reality underlying the phenomena, while a science which goes further than this and introduces hypotheses about reality, can never acquire certain knowledge of a positive kind about reality; in whatever way we proceed, this is forever denied us.
want mathematical thinker
The universe can best be pictured as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what for want of a better word we must describe as a mathematical thinker.
reality jeans mind
The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter...we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.
facts essentials observation
The essential fact is that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational facts, are mathematical pictures.