Quotes About Laplace

Napoleon , when hearing about Laplace 's latest book, said, ' M. Laplace , they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator .' Laplace responds, 'Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. ( I had no need of that hypothesis .)

All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.

Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself

The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability. —Pierre Simon Laplace, Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, 1812

It was the embryo, lost before that point at which Laplace can be distinguished from a turtle.

Yet Laplace had built his probability theory on intuition. As far as he was concerned, essentially, the theory of probability is nothing but good common sense reduced to mathematics. It provides an exact appreciation of what sound minds feel with a kind of instinct, frequently without being able to account for it.

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!

Laplace suggested that there should be a set of scientific laws that would allow us to predict everything that would happen in the universe, if only we knew the complete state of the universe at one time.

But Laplace's particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings.

Michael Shermer in the paper "Exorcising Laplace's demon: Chaos and antichaos, history and metahistory," History and Theory 34:59–83 (1995). Shermer's

How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.

I often asked Laplace what he thought of God. He owned that he was an atheist.

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.