Quotes About Fourier

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.

Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: "I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's laws.…" And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell.

Claro que si uno tuviera un receptor con paso de banda estrecha, y escuchara solo un mínimo margen de frecuencias, estaría obligado a aceptar la constante de tiempo larga. Jamás podríamos detectar una modulación rápida. Eso era una simple consecuencia del Teorema Integral de Fourier, estrechamente vinculado con el Principio de Incertidumbre de Heisenberg.

the simple algebraic equation ?+k3 = 0. This is called the dispersion relation of (1): with the help of the Fourier transform it is not hard to show that every solution is a superposition of solutions of the form ei(kx-?t), and the dispersion relation tells us how the "wave number" k is related to the "angular frequency" ? in each of these elementary solutions.

The almost timeless curvature of the space of ideas obeys neither chronology nor history. So the thoughts of Sade and Fourier are like anticipated repercussions of the theories of Marx and Freud, of which they are a much more radical critique avant la lettre than any that were to follow, exerting their effects only posthumously. To reread the world of ideas against the grain of the ideology of the Enlightenment, the ideology of a chronological order of events.

the root of the opposition to liberalism cannot be reached by resort to the method of reason. This opposition does not stem from reason, but from a pathological mental attitude, from resentment and from a neurasthenic condition that one might call a Fourier complex, after the French socialist of that name

For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.