"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the old one." I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice." (Albert Einstein, [Letter to Max Born] 1926)
"What had already been done for music by the end of the eighteenth century has at last been begun for the pictorial arts. Mathematics and physics furnished the means in the form of rules to be followed and to be broken. In the beginning it is wholesome to be concerned with the functions and to disregard the finished form. Studies in algebra, in geometry, in mechanics characterize teaching directed towards the essential and the functional, in contrast to apparent. One learns to look behind the façade, to grasp the root of things. One learns to recognize the undercurrents, the antecedents of the visible. One learns to dig down, to uncover, to find the cause, to analyze." (Paul Klee, "Bauhaus prospectus", 1929)
"Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter [...]" (James Jeans, "The Mysterious Universe", 1930)
"In Newton's system of mechanics […] there is an absolute space and an absolute time. In Einstein's theory time and space are interwoven, and the way in which they are interwoven depends on the observer. Instead of three plus one we have four dimensions." (Willem de Sitter, "Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe", Kosmos, 1932)
"A system such as classical mechanics may be 'scientific' to any degree you like; but those who uphold it dogmatically - believing, perhaps, that it is their business to defend such a successful system against criticism as long as it is not conclusively disproved - are adopting the very reverse of that critical attitude which in my view is the proper one for the scientist." (Karl R Popper, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", 1934)
"Yet a review of receipt physics has shown that all attempts at mechanical models or pictures have failed and must fail. For a mechanical model or picture must represent things as happening in space and time, while it has recently become clear that the ultimate processes of nature neither occur in, nor admit of representation in, space and time. Thus an understanding of the ultimate processes of nature is for ever beyond our reach: we shall never be able - even in imagination - to open the case of our watch and see how the wheels go round. The true object of scientific study can never be the realities of nature, but only our own observations on nature." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy", 1942)
"[In quantum mechanics] we have the paradoxical situation that observable events obey laws of chance, but that the probability for these events itself spreads according to laws which are in all essential features causal laws." (Max Born, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance, 1949)
"Unfortunately, the mechanical way in which calculus sometimes is taught fails to present the subject as the outcome of a dramatic intellectual struggle which has lasted for twenty-five hundred years or more, which is deeply rooted in many phases of human endeavors and which will continue as long as man strives to understand himself as well as nature. Teachers, students, and scholars who really want to comprehend the forces and appearances of science must have some understanding of the present aspect of knowledge as a result of historical evolution." (Richard Curand [forward to Carl B Boyer’s"The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development", 1949])
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