Quotes About Helmholtz

All that science can achieve is a perfect knowledge and a perfect understanding of the action of natural and moral forces.

A metaphysical conclusion is either a false conclusion or a concealed experimental conclusion.

It was my great good fortune, while I was still a student at college, to have possessed a copy of an English translation of his great work 'The Sensations of Tone.' As is well known, this was one of Helmholtz's masterpieces.

In the course of their next two or three meetings he frequently repeated this little act of vengeance. It was simple and, since both Helmholtz and the Savage were dreadfully pained by the shattering and defilement of a favourite poetic crystal, extremely effective.

Reason we call that faculty innate in us of discovering laws and applying them with thought.

Hermann von Helmholtz was the first to appreciate that the basilar membrane's operation is essentially the inverse of a piano's. The piano synthesizes a complex sound by combining the pure tones produced by numerous vibrating strings; the cochlea deconstructs a complex sound by isolating each component tone at a discrete segment of the basilar membrane.

the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday.

The conservation of energy in the atomic model found its final treatment in the hands of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), who, like Mayer, started from physiological considerations, and about whom we spoke in detail in the previous chapter. In his fundamental work of 1847 [18] he explicitly introduced the concept of potential energy.

The consequences of Thomson's Principle of Dissipation were elaborated by Hermann von Helmholtz, who two years later described the "heat death" of the universe, the consequence of the transformation of all energy into heat [14].

Thus, says Helmholtz [19], we do not try to construct machines that perform the thousands of acts typical of a man, but rather require that one machine performs a single act and replaces thousands of men.