"In perception, a knowledge forms itself slowly; in the [mental] image the knowledge is immediate. We see now that the image is a synthetic act which unites a concrete, nonimagined, knowledge to elements which are more actually representative. The image teaches nothing: it is organized exactly like the objects which do produce knowledge, but it is complete at the very moment of its appearance. […] Thus, the object presents itself in the image as having to be apprehended in a multiplicity of synthetic acts. Due to this fact, and because its content retains a sensible opacity, like a phantom, because it does not involve either essences or generating laws but only an irrational quality, it gives the impression of being an object of observation: from this point of view the image appears to be more like a perception than a concept." (Jean-Paul Sartre,"The Psychology of Imagination", 1940)
"Mathematics is an activity governed by the same rules imposed upon the symphonies of Beethoven, the paintings of DaVinci, and the poetry of Homer. Just as scales, as the laws of perspective, as the rules of metre seem to lack fire, the formal rules of mathematics may appear to be without lustre. Yet ultimately, mathematics reaches pinnacles as high as those attained by the imagination in its most daring reconnoiters. And this conceals, perhaps, the ultimate paradox of science. For in their prosaic plodding both logic and mathematics often outstrip their advance guard and show that the world of pure reason is stranger than the world of pure fancy." (Edward Kasner & James R Newman, "Mathematics and the Imagination", 1940)
"The fundamental difference between engineering with and without statistics boils down to the difference between the use of a scientific method based upon the concept of laws of nature that do not allow for chance or uncertainty and a scientific method based upon the concepts of laws of probability as an attribute of nature." (Walter A Shewhart, 1940)
"Thus, the object presents itself in the image as having to be apprehended in a multiplicity of synthetic acts. Due to this fact, and because its content retains a sensible opacity, like a phantom, because it does not involve either essences or generating laws but only an irrational quality, it gives the impression of being an object of observation: from this point of view the image appears to be more like a perception than a concept." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Psychology of Imagination", 1940)
"Can there be laws of chance? The answer, it would seem should be negative, since chance is in fact defined as the characteristic of the phenomena which follow no law, phenomena whose causes are too complex to permit prediction." (Félix E Borel, "Probabilities and Life", 1943)
"Exhaustive studies by many investigators have shown that the fundamental laws of nature do not control the phenomena directly. We must picture them as operating in a substratum of which we can form no mental picture unless we are willing to introduce a number of irrelevant and therefore unjustifiable suppositions." (James H Jeans," Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)
"Good physics is made a priori. Theory precedes fact. Experience is useless because before any experience we are already in possession of the knowledge we are seeking for. Fundamental laws of motion" (and of rest), laws that determine the spatio-temporal behavior of material bodies, are laws of a mathematical nature. Of the same nature as those which govern relations and laws of figures and numbers. We find and discover them not in Nature, but in ourselves, in our mind, in our memory, as Plato long ago has taught us." (Alexander Koyre, "Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century", The Philosophical Review Vol. 52 (3), 1943)
"[…] inner images are rather psychic manifestations of the archetypes which, however, would also have to put forth, create, condition anything lawlike in the behavior of the corporeal world. The laws of this world would then be the physical manifestations of the archetypes. […] Each law of nature should then have an inner correspondence and vice versa, even though this is not always directly visible today." (Wolfgang Pauli, [letter to Markus Fierz] 1948)
"Nothing is left in the world but happenings for which no explanation or interpretation is offered or even attempted, and science has now for its single aim the discovery of the laws to which these happenings conform - the pattern of events." (James H Jeans,"Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)
"The problem of physics is how the actual phenomena, as observed with the help of our sense organs aided by instruments, can be reduced to simple notions which are suited for precise measurement and used of the formulation of quantitative laws." (Max Born, "Experiment and Theory in Physics", 1944)
"The responsibility for the creation of new scientific knowledge - and for most of its application - rests on that small body of men and women who understand the fundamental laws of nature and are skilled in the techniques of scientific research. We shall have rapid or slow advance on any scientific frontier depending on the number of highly qualified and trained scientists exploring it."(Vannevar Bush, "Science: The Endless Frontier", 1945)
"What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations. It seems to me one has to postulate a cosmic order of nature - outside of our arbitrariness- to which the outer material objects are subjected as are the inner images […] The organizing and regulating has to be posited beyond the differentiation of physical and psychical […] I am all for it to call this ‘organizing and regulating’ ‘archetypes’. It would then be inadmissible to define these as psychic contents. Rather, the above-mentioned inner pictures" (dominants of the collective unconscious, see Jung) are the psychic manifestations of the archetypes, but which would have to produce and condition all nature laws belonging to the world of matter. The nature laws of matter would then be the physical manifestation of the archetypes." (Wolfgang Pauli, [Letter to Markus Fierz], 1948)
"As the complexity of the structure of matter became revealed through research, its basic simplicity, unity, and dependability became equally evident. So we now see ourselves in a world governed by natural laws instead of by capricious deities and devils. This does not necessarily mean that God has been ruled out of the picture, but it does mean that the architect and engineer of the universe is a far different type of being from the gods assumed by the ancients, and that man lives and dies in a world of logical system and orderly performance." (Karl T Compton, cca. 1930–1949)
"In classical physics, most of the fundamental laws of nature were concerned either with the stability of certain configurations of bodies, e.g. the solar system, or else with the conservation of certain properties of matter, e.g. mass, energy, angular momentum or spin. The outstanding exception was the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, discovered by Clausius in 1850. This law, as usually stated, refers to an abstract concept called entropy, which for any enclosed or thermally isolated system tends to increase continually with lapse of time. In practice, the most familiar example of this law occurs when two bodies are in contact: in general, heat tends to flow from the hotter body to the cooler. Thus, while the First Law of Thermodynamics, viz. the conservation of energy, is concerned only with time as mere duration, the Second Law involves the idea of trend." (Gerald J Whitrow, "The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology", 1949)
"[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)
"[…] science, properly interpreted, is not dependent on any sort of metaphysics. It merely attempts to cover a maximum of facts by a minimum of laws." (Herbert Feigl, "Naturalism and Humanism", American Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1949)
"The amount of human effort needed to handle information correctly depends very much on the properties of the physical equipment expressing the information, although the laws of correct reasoning are independent of the equipment." (Edmund C Berkeley, "Giant Brains or Machines that Think", 1949)
"[...] the conception of chance enters in the very first steps of scientific activity in virtue of the fact that no observation is absolutely correct. I think chance is a more fundamental conception that causality; for whether in a concrete case, a cause-effect relation holds or not can only be judged by applying the laws of chance to the observation." (Max Born, 1949)
"The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life." (Max Planck, "A Scientific Autobiography", 1949)
"We have assumed that the laws of nature must be capable of expression in a form which is invariant for all possible transformations of the space-time co-ordinates." (Gerald J Whitrow, "The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology", 1949)
"[...] when the pioneer in science sends for the groping feelers of his thoughts, he must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination. Nevertheless, the worth of a new idea is invariably determined, not by the degree of its intuitiveness - which, incidentally, is to a major extent a matter of experience and habit - but by the scope and accuracy of the individual laws to the discovery of which it eventually leads." (Max Planck, The Meaning and Limits of Exact Science", Science Vol. 110" (2857), 1949)
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