Top 35 Laplace Quotes
#3. What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense.
Pierre Laplace
#4. Napoleon: You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe. Laplace: Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis. Later when told by Napoleon about the incident, Lagrange commented: Ah, but that is a fine hypothesis. It explains so many things.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#5. I often asked Laplace what he thought of God. He owned that he was an atheist.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#6. Laplace's Demon, the hypothetical imp that knows the instantaneous positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, was said to be able to calculate the entire future or past by plugging these values into the equations that express the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism.
Steven Pinker
#8. Probability theory is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. -1819
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#9. To Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God: Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#10. All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#11. Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself
Henry Adams
#13. The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which of times they are unable to account.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#15. Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.
Pierre Laplace
#16. It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#17. I have lived long enough to know what I did not at one time believe
that no society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#18. Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words 'Thus it plainly appears', I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.
Nathaniel Bowditch
#19. The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#21. Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,-disentangle them who may.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#24. No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure.
Robert Andrews Millikan
#26. The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. Infinitely varied in its effects, nature is simple only in its causes, and its economy consists in producing a great number of phenomena, often very complicated, by means of a small number of general laws.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#27. 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.
Neil Armstrong
#28. Do you believe in god? I have no need for that hypothesis, he may be around though.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#30. The cosmos does not require God, Laplace said to himself. But Emperors require Him. All those who seek to subjugate human beings in one form or another require Him. Science does not need God.
Tomichan Matheikal
#32. ...by shortening the labours doubled the life of the astronomer.
{On the benefit of John Napier's logarithms.}
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#33. The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#34. Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories.
Pierre-Simon Laplace