Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier Quotes

All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.

That is to say, nature's laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space/time point.

In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.

I believe there are no questions that science can't answer about a physical universe.

Science doesn't in the slightest depend on trust. It depends completely on the belief that you can demonstrate something for yourself.

We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.

Science affects all our ways of thinking about the world: both the physical world, which, if I may make so bold, is easy to understand because it is regular and follows simple laws, and also the social world, which is more baffling and less predictable.

I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections; not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.

The term Science should not be given to anything but the aggregate of the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Physics is not a religion. If it were, we’d have a much easier time raising money.

What the founders of modern science ... had to do was to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science — and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.

I thought I should study physics because it's fundamental to all science.

Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.

The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The laws of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.

Science as we now understand the word is of later birth. If its germinal origin may be traced to the early period when Observation, Induction, and Deduction were first employed, its birth must be referred to that comparatively recent period when the mind, rejecting the primitive tendency to seek in supernatural agencies for an explanation of all external phenomena, endeavoured, by a systematic investigation of the phenomena themselves to discover their invariable order and connection.

… new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and … the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observed facts. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise

If the omniscient author of nature knew that the study of his works tends to make men disbelieve his Being or Attributes, he would not have given them so many invitations to study and contemplate Nature.

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

God has created a logical universe of cause and effect. He who repudiates causality actually repudiates reason.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired

Millions are spend annually on the cultivation and dissemination of science by the public authorities who will not give a penny for the advancement of astrology or sorcery. In other words, our society is deeply committed to beliefs about the nature of things, beliefs which are different from those to which the early Egyptian or Aztec civilizations were committed.

The individual in physical science is nothing; in human science everything.

I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.