“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 then hastily closing it... The act of the imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. ...every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. ...they introduce new likenesses, whether it is Shakespeare... or Newton saying that the moon in essence is exactly like a thrown apple.<!--pp. 108-110-->”
“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 M...”
Unification in science and mathematics
“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
“[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