TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it... That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That�s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index P > Category: Periphery

Periphery Quotes (3 quotes)

The greatest of all spectral classifiers, Antonia Maury had two strikes on her: the biggest one was, she was a woman. A woman had no chance at anything in astronomy except at Harvard in the 1880’s and 1890’s. And even there, things were rough. It now turns out that her director, E.C. Pickering, did not like the way she classified; she then refused to change to suit him; and after her great publication in Harvard Annals 28 (1897), she left Harvard—and in a sense, astronomy. ... I would say the most remarkable phenomenological investigation in modern astronomy is Miss Maury’s work in Harvard Annals 28. She didn’t have anything astrophysical to go on. Investigations between 1890 and 1900 were the origin of astrophysics. But these were solar, mostly. And there Miss Maury was on the periphery. I’ve seen pictures of groups, where she’d be standing away a little bit to one side of the other people, a little bit in the background. It was a very sad thing. When Hertzsprung wrote Pickering to congratulate him on Miss Maury’s work that had led to Hertzsprung’s discovery of super giants, Pickering is supposed to have replied that Miss Maury’s work was wrong — could not possibly be correct.
'Oral History Transcript: Dr. William Wilson Morgan' (8 Aug 1978) in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives.
Science quotes on:  |  Astronomer (97)  |  Astronomy (251)  |  Astrophysics (15)  |  Background (44)  |  Chance (244)  |  Change (639)  |  Classification (102)  |  Congratulation (5)  |  Correctness (12)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Giant (73)  |  Great (1610)  |  Greatest (330)  |  Group (83)  |  Harvard (7)  |  Ejnar Hertzsprung (2)  |  Investigation (250)  |  Little (717)  |  Antonia Maury (2)  |  Miss (51)  |  Modern (402)  |  Most (1728)  |  Origin (250)  |  Other (2233)  |  People (1031)  |  Phenomenology (3)  |  Photograph (23)  |  Edward Charles Pickering (2)  |  Picture (148)  |  Possibly (111)  |  Publication (102)  |  Reply (58)  |  Research (753)  |  Sadness (36)  |  Say (989)  |  Sense (785)  |  Side (236)  |  Spectrum (35)  |  Strike (72)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Turn (454)  |  Two (936)  |  Way (1214)  |  Woman (160)  |  Work (1402)  |  Wrong (246)

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Reevaluation of some statements entails reevaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections—the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field.
'Two Dogmas of Experience,' in Philosophical Review (1951). Reprinted in From a Logical Point of View (1953), 42.
Science quotes on:  |  Atomic Physics (7)  |  Being (1276)  |  Belief (615)  |  Boundary (55)  |  Call (781)  |  Casual (9)  |  Certain (557)  |  Change (639)  |  Condition (362)  |  Conflict (77)  |  Edge (51)  |  Element (322)  |  Experience (494)  |  Fabric (27)  |  Field (378)  |  Figure (162)  |  Force (497)  |  Geography (39)  |  History (716)  |  Impinge (4)  |  Interconnection (12)  |  Interior (35)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Law (913)  |  Logic (311)  |  Man (2252)  |  Man-Made (10)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Mathematics And Logic (27)  |  Matter (821)  |  Most (1728)  |  Occasion (87)  |  Other (2233)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physics (564)  |  Pure (299)  |  Pure Mathematics (72)  |  Reevaluation (2)  |  So-Called (71)  |  Statement (148)  |  System (545)  |  Total (95)  |  Totality (17)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Turn (454)  |  Value (393)

Theorem I. The first and most simple manifestation and representation of things, non-existent as well as latent in the folds of Nature, happened by means of straight line and circle.
Theorem II. Yet the circle cannot be artificially produced without the straight line, or the straight line without the point. Hence, things first began to be by way of a point, and a monad. And things related to the periphery (however big they may be) can in no way exist without the aid of the central point.
John Dee
From Monas Hierogyphica: Ioannia Dee, Londinensis (The Hieroglyphic Monad of John Dee, of London) translated by C. H.Josten, in Ambix, vol. 12 (1964). As quoted and cited in Philip Davis with Reuben Hersh, in The Mathematical Experience (1981), 103.
Science quotes on:  |  Aid (101)  |  Artificial (38)  |  Beginning (312)  |  Central (81)  |  Circle (117)  |  Existence (481)  |  First (1302)  |  Fold (9)  |  Latent (13)  |  Manifestation (61)  |  Monad (2)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Point (584)  |  Produce (117)  |  Relate (26)  |  Representation (55)  |  Simple (426)  |  Straight Line (34)  |  Theorem (116)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.