Both Leonardo and Newton had fecund imaginations from which poured forth a stream of discoveries, gadgets, engineering marvels, an...d farsighted contrivances. Newton invented the reflecting telescope, Leonardo the helicopter; Newton, the binomial theorem, Leonardo, the parachute, submarine, and tank. Newton's discover ies were expressed in equations. Leonardo's in drawings. Leonardo made many contributions to science, both in theory and application, but he is principally featured in art history classes. Newton wrote lengthy exegeses on alchemy, the mysteries of the Trinity, and the authority of the Bible, yet he is considered history's premier physicist.... Each man transformed the science of his day from one that held an essentially static view of the universe into one that included motion. The subject of motion consumed them both and their greatest contributions to humankind grew out of an intense curiosity about it. Newton's ambitious desire to explain celes tial movements resulted in the formulation of his three famous laws of motion and his discovery of the inverse square law of gravitation. Leonardo's compelling studies of the muscular movements of men and horses, exemplified in his cartoons for his Battle of Anghiari, are the most detailed anatomical descriptions of men and animals in motion that have ever been produced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amend...ed to be true, they lose their explanatory force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The laws of God, the laws of man, He may keep that will and can;... Not I: let God and man decree Laws for themselves and not for me;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A law explains a set of observations; a theory explains a set of laws. The quintessential illustration of this jump in level is th...e way in which Newton's theory of mechanics explained Kepler's law of planetary motion. Basically, a law applies to observed phenomena in one domain (e.g., planetary bodies and their movements), while a theory is intended to unify phenomena in many domains. Thus, Newton's theory of mechanics explained not only Kepler's laws, but also Galileo's findings about the motion of balls rolling down an inclined plane, as well as the pattern of oceanic tides. Unlike laws, theories often postulate unobservable objects as part of their explanatory mechanism. So, for instance, Freud's theory of mind relies upon the unobservable ego, superego, and id, and in modern physics we have theories of elementary particles that postulate various types of quarks, all of which have yet to be observed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ba...ll. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary t...o fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If ... we admit a divinity, why not divine worship? and if worship, why not religion to teach this worship? and if a religion, why... not the Christian, if a better cannot be assigned, and it be already established by the laws of our country, and handed down to us from our forefathers?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed-time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in g...eneral, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connexion between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of nature, without which we should be all in uncertainty and confusion, and a grown man no more know how to manage himself in the affairs of life than an infant just born.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two children, all alone and no one by, Holding their tattered frocks, thro'an airy maze... Of motion lightly threaded with nimble feet Dance sedately; face to face they gaze, Their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »