“It appears... that the elastic theories of light, if Kelvin's gyrostatic adynamic ether be admitted, have not been wholly routed. Nevertheless the great electromagnetic theory of light propounded by Maxwell (1864, 'Treatise,' 1873) has been singularly apt not only in explaining all the phenomena reached by the older theories and in predicting entirely novel results, but in harmoniously uniting as parts of a unique doctrine, both the electric or photographic light vector of Fresnel and Cauchy and the magnetic vector of Neumann and MacCullagh. Its predictions have, moreover, been astonishingly verified by the work of Hertz (1890), and it is to-day acquiring added power in the convection theories of Lorentz (1895) and others.”
“Whatever its source, mathematics has come down to the present by the two main streams of number and form. The first carried along arithmetic and algebra, the second, geometry. In the seventeenth centu...”
Unification in science and mathematics
“Science is an attempt to represent the known world as a closed system with a perfect formalism. Scientific discovery is a constant maverick process of breaking out at the ends of the system... and the...”
Unification in science and mathematics
“[T]he attempt to embrace the whole course of things in time and to relate the successive epochs to one another—the transition to the view that time is actually aiming at something, that temporal succe...”
Unification in science and mathematics
“Let us assert, as our original postulate, that, the multiple (that is, non-being, if taken in the pure state) being the only rational form of a creatable (creabile) nothingness, the creative act is co...”
Unification in science and mathematics
“The scientific spirit must then lose its present tendency to speciality, and be impelled towards a logical generality; for all the branches of natural philosophy must furnish their contingent to the c...”
Unification in science and mathematics