Best 17 quotes of Oliver Heaviside on MyQuotes

Oliver Heaviside

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Criticized for using formal mathematical manipulations, without understanding how they worked: Should I refuse a good dinner simply because I do not understand the process of digestion?

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of electromagnetics, in spite of the abstract nature of its theory, involving quantities whose nature is entirely unknown at the present, is really and truly founded on the observations of real Newtonian forces, electric and magnetic respectively.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Euclid for children is barbarous.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency. Let them be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    If it is love that makes the world go round, it is self-induction that makes electromagnetic waves go round the world.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties in Euclid's Elements, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally .. obvious.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Logic can be patient, for it is eternal.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Mathematics is of two kinds, Rigorous and Physical. The former is Narrow: the latter Bold and Broad. To have to stop to formulate rigorous demonstrations would put a stop to most physico-mathematical inquiries. Am I to refuse to eat because I do not fully understand the mechanism of digestion?

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Ohm (a distinguished mathematician, be it noted) brought into order a host of puzzling facts connecting electromotive force and electric current in conductors, which all previous electricians had only succeeded in loosely binding together qualitatively under some rather vague statements. Even as late as 20 years ago, "quantity" and "tension" were much used by men who did not fully appreciate Ohm's law.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    ...there is no absolute scale of size in nature, and the small may be as important, or more so than the great.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Waves from moving sources: Adagio. Andante. Allegro moderato.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth. But, as was mentioned to me not long since, "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Why should I refuse a good dinner simply because I don't understand the digestive processes involved?

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    Oliver Heaviside

    Ohm found that the results could be summed up in such a simple law that he who runs may read it, and a schoolboy now can predict what a Faraday then could only guess at roughly. By Ohm's discovery a large part of the domain of electricity became annexed by Coulomb's discovery of the law of inverse squares, and completely annexed by Green's investigations. Poisson attacked the difficult problem of induced magnetisation, and his results, though differently expressed, are still the theory, as a most important first approximation. Ampere brought a multitude of phenomena into theory by his investigations of the mechanical forces between conductors supporting currents and magnets. Then there were the remarkable researches of Faraday, the prince of experimentalists, on electrostatics and electrodynamics and the induction of currents. These were rather long in being brought from the crude experimental state to a compact system, expressing the real essence. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Faraday was not a mathematician. It can scarcely be doubted that had he been one, he would have anticipated much later work. He would, for instance, knowing Ampere's theory, by his own results have readily been led to Neumann's theory, and the connected work of Helmholtz and Thomson. But it is perhaps too much to expect a man to be both the prince of experimentalists and a competent mathematician.

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    Oliver Heaviside

    As to the need of improvement there can be no question whilst the reign of Euclid continues. My own idea of a useful course is to begin with arithmetic, and then not Euclid but algebra. Next, not Euclid, but practical geometry, solid as well as plane; not demonstration, but to make acquaintance. Then not Euclid, but elementary vectors, conjoined with algebra, and applied to geometry. Addition first; then the scalar product. Elementary calculus should go on simultaneously, and come into vector algebraic geometry after a bit. Euclid might be an extra course for learned men, like Homer...