Pierre-Simon Laplace Quotes
-
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye.
→ -
[Science] dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relations with nature, errors the more damaging in that the social order should rest only on those relations. TRUTH! JUSTICE! Those are the immutable laws. Let us banish the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to depart from them and to deceive or enslave mankind to assure its happiness.
→ -
The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which of times they are unable to account.
→ -
What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.
→ -
I have no need for that hypothesis.
→ -
Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
→ -
The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God.
→ -
All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.
→ -
His last words, according to De Morgan: Man follows only phantoms.
→ -
Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.
→ -
I see with much pleasure that you are working on a large work on the integral Calculus ... The reconciliation of the methods which you are planning to make, serves to clarify them mutually, and what they have in common contains very often their true metaphysics; this is why that metaphysics is almost the last thing that one discovers. The spirit arrives at the results as if by instinct; it is only on reflecting upon the route that it and others have followed that it succeeds in generalising the methods and in discovering its metaphysics.
→ -
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
→ -
It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations.
→ -
Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration.
→ -
[It] may be laid down as a general rule that, if the result of a long series of precise observations approximates a simple relation so closely that the remaining difference is undetectable by observation and may be attributed to the errors to which they are liable, then this relation is probably that of nature.
→ -
Truth and justice are the immutable laws of social order.
→ -
The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.
→ -
The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time.
→ -
If an event can be produced by a number n of different causes, the probabilities of the existence of these causes, given the event (prises de l'événement), are to each other as the probabilities of the event, given the causes: and the probability of each cause is equal to the probability of the event, given that cause, divided by the sum of all the probabilities of the event, given each of the causes.
→ -
To Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God: Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
→ -
The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it.
→ -
However, the small probability of a similar encounter [of the earth with a comet], can become very great in adding up over a huge sequence of centuries. It is easy to picture to oneself the effects of this impact upon the Earth. The axis and the motion of rotation changed; the seas abandoning their old position to throw themselves toward the new equator; a large part of men and animals drowned in this universal deluge, or destroyed by the violent tremor imparted to the terrestrial globe.
→ -
We are so far from knowing all the forces of nature and their various modes of action that it would be unworthy of the philosopher to deny phenomena simply because they are inexplicable at the present state of our knowledge. The more difficult it is to acknowledge their existence, the greater the care with which we must study these phenomena.
→ -
I have lived long enough to know what I did not at one time believe--that no society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion.
→ -
Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories.
→ -
Read Euler, read Euler. He is the master of us all.
→ -
The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.
→ -
What we know is not much. What we don't know is enormous.
→ -
Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.
→ -
Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation.
→
Related Authors
-
Leonhard Euler Mathematician -
Karl Weierstrass Mathematician -
Daniel Bernoulli Mathematician -
Joseph Fourier Mathematician -
Simeon Denis Poisson Mathematician -
Adrien-Marie Legendre Mathematician -
Antoine Lavoisier Chemist -
Augustin-Louis Cauchy Mathematician -
Gottfried Leibniz Mathematician -
Pierre de Fermat Lawyer -
Nicolaus Copernicus Mathematician -
Carl Friedrich Gauss Mathematician -
Johann Bernoulli Mathematician -
Isaac Newton Physicist -
Karl Pearson Mathematician -
Johannes Kepler Mathematician -
Joseph-Louis Lagrange Mathematician -
Adolphe Quetelet Astronomer -
Jean le Rond d'Alembert Mathematician -
Bernhard Riemann Mathematician