Quotes from William H. Cropper

work was his restorative.

He was the first to understand that unambiguous equivalence principles could be obtained only with the most inspired attention to experimental accuracy.

His early researches were pursued partly in the spirit of a young gentleman's entertainment, which happened to be science instead of fighting or politics or gambling.

The gifted student who has studied under a great teacher would almost certainly adopt a less independent tone in his first papers, because he would have the attitude of a pupil to his senior, besides a deference due to appreciation of his senior's achievements. A student without deference after distinguished tuition is almost always mediocre.

It is a striking fact that the history of each science shows continuity back to its first use of measurement, before which it exhibits no ancestry but metaphysics.

Only a few of Newton's contemporaries read the Principia with comprehension, and following generations chose to translate it into a more transparent, if less elegant, combination of algebra and the Newton-Leibniz calculus.

Joule wrote later in his autobiographical note, "Dalton possessed a rare power of engaging the affection of his pupils for scientific truth; and it was from his instruction that I first formed a desire to increase my knowledge by original researches.

His first determination, in 1843, of the mechanical equivalent of heat was ignored, and subsequent determinations were given little attention until Thomson and Stokes took notice at the British Association meeting in 1847.

I do not even know what a matrix is," Heisenberg complained to Jordan. As

Thomson particularly admired Fourier's agnostic theoretical method, based on mathematical models that were useful but at the same time noncommittal on the difficult question of the nature of heat.

On one assessment there should be no doubt: Newton was the greatest creative genius physics has ever seen. None of the other candidates for the superlative (Einstein, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and Feynman) has matched Newton's combined achievements as theoretician, experimentalist, and mathematician.

Church doctrine had it otherwise: Earth was at the center. The conflict between Galileo's telescope and Church dogma brought disaster to Galileo, but in the end the telescope prevailed, and the dramatic story of the confrontation taught Galileo's most important lesson.

They gave us the rules of the game and the durable conviction that the physical world is comprehensible.

I keep [a] subject constantly before me," Newton once remarked, "and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through his high-discipline he converted the fire into a central glow and motive force of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion.

He had the idea, which he could see confirmed in the evidence of electrochemistry, that when two electrically charged bodies influence each other the effect depends not only on the charge itself but also on the medium between the two bodies. He designed a device called a "capacitor" in modern terminology. It consisted of two concentric brass spheres separated electrically by shellac insulation.