Lord Kelvin
Lord Kelvin
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin OM GCVO PC PRS FRSEwas an Irish and Scottish mathematical physicist and engineer who was born in Belfast in 1824. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. He worked closely with mathematics professor Hugh Blackburn in his work. He also had a career...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth26 June 1824
CountryIreland
Lord Kelvin quotes about
Do not be afraid of being free thinkers! If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all religion. You will find science not antagonistic but helpful to religion.
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherialization of common sense.
...Creative Power is the only feasible answer to the origin of life from a scientific perspective.
If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery.
The fact that mathematics does such a good job of describing the Universe is a mystery that we don't understand. And a debt that we will probably never be able to repay.
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.
Radio has no future." "X-rays are clearly a hoax". "The aeroplane is scientifically impossible.
Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results.
Fourier is a mathematical poem.
Nothing can be more fatal to progress than a too confident reliance on mathematical symbols; for the student is only too apt to take the easier course, and consider the formula not the fact as the physical reality.
The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I do not see how I can put it in words.