"A true philosopher does not engage in vain disputes about the nature of motion; rather, he wishes to know the laws by which it is distributed, conserved or destroyed, knowing that such laws is the basis for all natural philosophy." (Pierre L Maupertuis, "Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique", 1746)
"The supreme Being is everywhere; but He is not equally
visible everywhere. Let us seek Him in the simplest things, in the most
fundamental laws of Nature, in the universal rules by which movement is
conserved, distributed or destroyed; and let us not seek Him in phenomena that
are merely complex consequences of these laws."
"Nature as a whole possesses a store of force which cannot in
any way be either increased or diminished [...] therefore, the quantity of force
in Nature is just as eternal and unalterable as the quantity of matter [...]. I
have named [this] general law 'The Principle of the Conservation of
Force'." (Hermann von Helmholtz, "Uber die Erhaltung der Kraft", 1847)
"Energy really is only an integral; now, what we want to have
is a substantial definition, like that of Leibniz, and this demand is justifiable
to a certain degree, since our very conviction of the conservation of energy
rests in great part on this foundation. [..] And so the manuals of physics
contain really two discordant definitions of energy, the first which is verbal,
intelligible, capable of establishing our conviction, and false; and the second
which is mathematical, exact, but lacking verbal expression." (Emile Meyerson, "Identity
& Reality", 1908)
"The miracles of religion are to be discredited, not because we
cannot conceive of them, but because they run counter to all the rest of our
knowledge; while the mysteries of science, such as chemical affinity, the
conservation of energy, the indivisibility of the atom, the change of the non-living
into the living […] extend the boundaries of our knowledge, though the modus
operandi of the changes remains hidden." (John Burroughs, "Scientific Faith", The
Atlantic Monthly, 1915)
"The most important result of a general character to which the special theory has led is concerned with the conception of mass. Before the advent of relativity, physics recognized two conservation laws of fundamental importance, namely, the law of conservation of energy and the law of the conservation of mass; these two fundamental laws appeared to be quite independent of each other. By means of the theory of relativity they have been united into one law." (Albert Einstein, 1920)
"Matter [...] could be measured as a quantity and [...] its characteristic expression as a substance was the Law of Conservation of Matter [...] This, which has hitherto represented our knowledge of space and matter, and which was in many quarters claimed by philosophers as a priori knowledge, absolutely general and necessary, stands to-day a tottering structure." (Hermann Weyl, "Space, Time, Matter", 1922)
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