James Maxwell Quotes

#1. We define thermodynamics ... as the investigation of the dynamical and thermal properties of bodies, deduced entirely from the first and second law of thermodynamics, without speculation as to the molecular constitution.

James Clerk Maxwell

#2. Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.

James Clerk Maxwell

#3. Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.

James Clerk Maxwell

#4. The aether: Invented by Isaac Newton, reinvented by James Clerk Maxwell. This is the stuff that fills up the empty space of the universe. Discredited and discarded by Einstein, the aether is now making a Nixonian comeback. It's really the vacuum, but burdened by theoretical, ghostly particles.

Leon M. Lederman

#5. The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.

James C. Maxwell

#6. Heat may be generated and destroyed by certain processes, and this shows that heat is not a substance.

James Clerk Maxwell

#7. The chief philosophical value of physics is that it gives the mind something distinct to lay hold of, which, if you don't, Nature at once tells you you are wrong.

James Clerk Maxwell

#8. Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.

James C. Maxwell

#9. Anyone who thinks the sky is the limit, has limited imagination.

James Maxwell

#10. Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.

James C. Maxwell

#11. We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.

James Clerk Maxwell

#12. An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.

James Clerk Maxwell

#13. In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.

James Clerk Maxwell

#14. I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.

James C. Maxwell

#15. Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

James C. Maxwell

#16. But though the professed aim of all scientific work is to unravel the secrets of nature, it has another effect, not less valuable, on the mind of the worker. It leaves him in possession of methods which nothing but scientific work could have led him to invent.

James Clerk Maxwell

#17. Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of electromagnetism.

James Clerk Maxwell

#18. The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing-glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world.

James Clerk Maxwell

#19. What's the go of that? What's the particular go of that?

James Clerk Maxwell

#20. The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds.

James Clerk Maxwell

#21. Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men's hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression 'structureless germs'.

James Clerk Maxwell

#22. I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.

James Clerk Maxwell

#23. The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.

James Clerk Maxwell

#24. Only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.

Muriel Rukeyser

#25. One of the chief peculiarities of this treatise is the doctrine that the true electric current, on which the electromagnetic phenomena depend, is not the same thing as the current of conduction, but that the time-variation of the electric displacement must [also] be taken into account ...

James Clerk Maxwell

#26. All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

James C. Maxwell

#27. I have looked into the most philosophical systems and have found none that will not work without God.

James Clerk Maxwell

#28. Gin a body meet a body
Flyin' through the air,
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? and where?

James Clerk Maxwell

#29. There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski.

James R Newman

#30. If the hand of God had come down from heaven and smacked him dead, James could not have been more surprised.
He waited, certain he had misunderstood.

Cathy Maxwell

#31. One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell.

Albert Einstein

#32. The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?

James C. Maxwell

#33. The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

James Clerk Maxwell

#34. In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.

James C. Maxwell

#35. It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state ...

James Clerk Maxwell

#36. Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.

James Clerk Maxwell

#37. Colour as perceived by us is a function of three independent variables at least three are I think sufficient, but time will show if I thrive.

James Clerk Maxwell

#38. The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.

James Clerk Maxwell

#39. James Clerk Maxwell's [work is the] most profound and the most fruitful ...

Albert Einstein

#40. It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.

James Clerk Maxwell

#41. The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.

James Clerk Maxwell

#42. By the study of Boltzmann I have been unable to understand him. He could not understand me on account of my shortness, and his length was and is an equal stumbling block to me.

James Clerk Maxwell

#43. Learn from this mistake, for a mistake it was. You failed. The next time you have an opportunity for happiness, you must take it.

James Maxwell

#44. Almighty God, Who hast created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over Thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service;

James Clerk Maxwell

#45. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.

{Referring to James Clerk Maxwell's contributions to physics}

Albert Einstein

#46. The equations at which we arrive must be such that a person of any nation, by substituting the numerical values of the quantities as measured by his own national units, would obtain a true result.

James Clerk Maxwell

#47. Gases are distinguished from other forms of matter, not only by their power of indefinite expansion so as to fill any vessel, however large, and by the great effect heat has in dilating them, but by the uniformity and simplicity of the laws which regulate these changes.

James Clerk Maxwell

#48. It would of course be a great step forward if we succeeded in combining the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field into a single structure. Only so could the era in theoretical physics inaugurated by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell be brought to a satisfactory close.

Albert Einstein

#49. In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy.

James Clerk Maxwell

#50. In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data.

James Clerk Maxwell