Percy Williams Bridgman famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Science #Ideas #Impact
If a specific question has meaning, it must be possible to find operations by which an answer may be given to it ... I believe that many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Philosophical #Believe #Science
To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Determined #Length #Operations
The operational approach demands that we make our reports and do our thinking in the freshest terms of which we are capable, in which we strip off the sophistications of millenia of culture and report as directly as we can on what happens.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Science #Thinking #Culture
The feeling of understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it any ostensibly scientific activity is as sterile as that of a high school student substituting numbers into a formula. For this reason, science, when I push the analysis back as far as I can, must be private.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Pain #Heart #School
I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Attitude #Distance #Astrology
The result is that a generation of physicists is growing up who have never exercised any particular degree of individual initiative, who have had no opportunity to experience its satisfactions or its possibilities, and who regard cooperative work in large teams as the normal thing. It is a natural corollary for them to feel that the objectives of these large teams must be something of large social significance.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Growing Up #Team #Opportunity
Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Men #Doe #Made
Coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Coincidence #Theory
By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Lying #Moving #Mind
It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Mathematics #Invention #Observation
I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the average man should have a philosophy. For there are certain aspects of the relation between science and society that the scientist can appreciate better than anyone else, and if he does not insist on this significance no one else will, with the result that the relation of science to society will become warped, to the detriment of everybody.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Philosophy #Believe #Men
Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Science #Scientific Method #Scientist
My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the articles in the Encyclopaedia, is that it must be public.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Science #Views #Point Of View
The first business of a man of science is to proclaim the truth as he finds it, and let the world adjust itself as best it can to the new knowledge.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Knowledge #Men #Firsts
... the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Science #Bully #Ruffian
The process that I want to call scientific is a process that involves the continual apprehension of meaning, the constant appraisal of significance accompanied by a running act of checking to be sure that I am doing what I want to do, and of judging correctness or incorrectness. This checking and judging and accepting, that together constitute understanding, are done by me and can be done for me by no one else. They are as private as my toothache, and without them science is dead.
-- Percy Williams Bridgman

#Running #Science #Judging

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