"When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." (John Muir, "My First Summer in the Sierra", 1911)
"No one can predict how far we shall be enabled by means of
our limited intelligence to penetrate into the mysteries of a universe immeasurably
vast and wonderful; nevertheless, each step in advance is certain to bring new
blessings to humanity and new inspiration to greater endeavor." (Theodore W Richards, "The Fundamental Properties of the Elements", [Faraday lecture] 1911)
"[…] mathematical verities flow from a small number of self-evident propositions by a chain of impeccable reasonings; they impose themselves not only on us, but on nature itself. They fetter, so to speak, the Creator and only permit him to choose between some relatively few solutions. A few experiments then will suffice to let us know what choice he has made. From each experiment a number of consequences will follow by a series of mathematical deductions, and in this way each of them will reveal to us a corner of the universe. This, to the minds of most people, and to students who are getting their first ideas of physics, is the origin of certainty in science." (Henri Poincaré, "The Foundations of Science", 1913)
"The only true voyage of discovery […] would be not to visit new landscapes, but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees." (Marcel Proust, "À la recherche du temps perdu", 1913)
"Science is reduction. Mathematics is its ideal, its form par excellence, for it is in mathematics that assimilation, identification, is most perfectly realized. The universe, scientifically explained, would be a certain formula, one and eternal, regarded as the equivalent of the entire diversity and movement of things." (Émile Boutroux, "Natural law in Science and Philosophy", 1914)
"Transcending the flux of the sensuous universe, there exists a stable world of pure thought, a divinely ordered world of ideas, accessible to man, free from the mad dance of time, infinite and eternal." (John M Keynes, "The Human Worth of Rigorous Thinking", 1916)
"The concept of an independent system is a pure creation of the imagination. For no material system is or can ever be perfectly isolated from the rest of the world. Nevertheless it completes the mathematician’s ‘blank form of a universe’ without which his investigations are impossible. It enables him to introduce into his geometrical space, not only masses and configurations, but also physical structure and chemical composition." (Lawrence J Henderson, "The Order of Nature: An Essay", 1917)
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