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: “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index V > Category: Vortex

Vortex Quotes (10 quotes)

A Frenchman who arrives in London, will find Philosophy, like every Thing else, very much chang’d there. He had left the World a plenum, and he now finds it a vacuum. At Paris the Universe is seen, compos’d of Vortices of subtile Matter; but nothing like it is seen in London. In France, ‘tis the Pressure of the Moon that causes the Tides; but in England ‘tis the Sea that gravitates towards the Moon; so what when you think that the Moon should make it flood with us, those Gentlemen fancy it should be Ebb, which, very unluckily, cannot be prov’d. For to be able to do this, ‘tis necessary the Moon and the Tides should have been enquir’d into, at the very instant of the Creation.
Letter XIV. 'On DesCartes and Sir Isaac Newton', in Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), 109-110.
Science quotes on:  |  Cause (561)  |  Creation (350)  |  Do (1905)  |  Ebb (4)  |  England (43)  |  Fancy (50)  |  Find (1014)  |  Flood (52)  |  France (29)  |  Gentleman (26)  |  Gravitation (72)  |  Instant (46)  |  London (15)  |  Matter (821)  |  Moon (252)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Paris (11)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Plenum (2)  |  Pressure (69)  |  Prove (261)  |  Sea (326)  |  Subtile (3)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Think (1122)  |  Tide (37)  |  Universe (900)  |  Unlucky (2)  |  Vacuum (41)  |  Will (2350)  |  World (1850)

I think each individual is never a plane but a polyhedron. Naturally, whenever a ray of light falls on a face, a vertex, an edge of this polyhedron; the arc that it reflects is undoubtedly variable, very complex and single or multicoloured. I don’t believe in plane men, I think we’re all multiple. We don’t have a double life, we have a multiple life. However, it is no less true that we’re thought to have a common denominator. I think I am or I aspire to be an honest man that tries not to bother too many people in this valley of tears.
From Cela Foundation biography webpage.
Science quotes on:  |  Arc (14)  |  Aspire (15)  |  Belief (615)  |  Bother (8)  |  Complex (202)  |  Double (18)  |  Edge (51)  |  Face (214)  |  Fall (243)  |  Honest (53)  |  Individual (420)  |  Life (1870)  |  Light (635)  |  Multiple (19)  |  People (1031)  |  Plane (22)  |  Ray (115)  |  Reflect (39)  |  Single (365)  |  Tear (48)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thought (995)  |  True (239)  |  Valley (37)  |  Variable (37)

In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge... to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (wch brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition but being absent from books & taking the common estimate in use among Geographers & our seamen before Norwood had measured the earth, that 60 English miles were contained in one degree of latitude on the surface of the Earth his computation did not agree with his theory & inclined him then to entertain a notion that together with the force of gravity there might be a mixture of that force wch the moon would have if it was carried along in a vortex.
[The earliest account of Newton, gravity and an apple.]
Memorandum of a conversation with Newton in August 1726. Quoted in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980), 154.
Science quotes on:  |  Absent (3)  |  Account (195)  |  Apple (46)  |  Being (1276)  |  Book (413)  |  Calculation (134)  |  Certain (557)  |  Common (447)  |  Computation (28)  |  Degree (277)  |  Distance (171)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Effect (414)  |  Entertain (27)  |  Estimate (59)  |  Extend (129)  |  Farther (51)  |  Force (497)  |  Garden (64)  |  Gravity (140)  |  Ground (222)  |  High (370)  |  Himself (461)  |  Inclined (41)  |  Influence (231)  |  Limit (294)  |  Limited (102)  |  Mixture (44)  |  Moon (252)  |  Mother (116)  |  Motion (320)  |  Must (1525)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Notion (120)  |  Orbit (85)  |  Power (771)  |  Retain (57)  |  Supposition (50)  |  Surface (223)  |  Surface Of The Earth (36)  |  Theory (1015)  |  Thought (995)  |  Together (392)  |  Tree (269)  |  Use (771)  |  Usually (176)  |  Why (491)  |  Year (963)

It seems to me that you are solving a problem which goes beyond the limits of physiology in too simple a way. Physiology has realized its problem with fortitude, breaking man down into endless actions and counteractions and reducing him to a crossing, a vortex of reflex acts. Let it now permit sociology to restore him as a whole. Sociology will wrest man from the anatomical theatre and return him to history.
Letter to his son, Alexander, July-Aug 1868. Trans. Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), 223.
Science quotes on:  |  Act (278)  |  Action (342)  |  Beyond (316)  |  Down (455)  |  Endless (60)  |  History (716)  |  Limit (294)  |  Man (2252)  |  Permit (61)  |  Physiology (101)  |  Problem (731)  |  Reflex (14)  |  Return (133)  |  Simple (426)  |  Sociology (46)  |  Way (1214)  |  Whole (756)  |  Will (2350)

Jupiter is the largest of all the solar system’s planets, more than ten times bigger and three hundred times as massive as Earth. Jupiter is so immense it could swallow all the other planets easily. Its Great Red Spot, a storm that has raged for centuries, is itself wider than Earth. And the Spot is merely one feature visible among the innumerable vortexes and streams of Jupiter’s frenetically racing cloud tops. Yet Jupiter is composed mainly of the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, more like a star than a planet. All that size and mass, yet Jupiter spins on its axis in less than ten hours, so fast that the planet is clearly not spherical: Its poles are noticeably flattened. Jupiter looks like a big, colorfully striped beach ball that’s squashed down as if some invisible child were sitting on it. Spinning that fast, Jupiter’s deep, deep atmosphere is swirled into bands and ribbons of multihued clouds: pale yellow, saffron orange, white, tawny yellow-brown, dark brown, bluish, pink and red. Titanic winds push the clouds across the face of Jupiter at hundreds of kilometers per hour.
Ben Bova
Jupiter
Science quotes on:  |  Across (32)  |  Atmosphere (117)  |  Axis (9)  |  Ball (64)  |  Band (9)  |  Beach (23)  |  Big (55)  |  Brown (23)  |  Century (319)  |  Child (333)  |  Clearly (45)  |  Cloud (111)  |  Compose (20)  |  Dark (145)  |  Deep (241)  |  Down (455)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Easily (36)  |  Element (322)  |  Face (214)  |  Fast (49)  |  Feature (49)  |  Great (1610)  |  Helium (11)  |  Hour (192)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Hundreds (6)  |  Hydrogen (80)  |  Immense (89)  |  Innumerable (56)  |  Invisible (66)  |  Jupiter (28)  |  Kilometer (10)  |  Large (398)  |  Largest (39)  |  Less (105)  |  Light (635)  |  Look (584)  |  Mainly (10)  |  Mass (160)  |  Massive (9)  |  Merely (315)  |  More (2558)  |  Orange (15)  |  Other (2233)  |  Pale (9)  |  Pink (4)  |  Planet (402)  |  Pole (49)  |  Push (66)  |  Race (278)  |  Rage (10)  |  Red (38)  |  Ribbon (2)  |  Sit (51)  |  Sitting (44)  |  Size (62)  |  Solar System (81)  |  Solar Systems (5)  |  Sphere (118)  |  Spin (26)  |  Spinning (18)  |  Spot (19)  |  Squash (4)  |  Star (460)  |  Storm (56)  |  Stream (83)  |  Stripe (4)  |  Swallow (32)  |  Swirl (10)  |  System (545)  |  Tawny (3)  |  Time (1911)  |  Titanic (4)  |  Top (100)  |  Visible (87)  |  White (132)  |  Wide (97)  |  Wind (141)  |  Yellow (31)

My soul is an entangled knot,
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
And thine doth like a convict sit,
With marline-spike untwisting it,
Only to find its knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for its untying
In four-dimensional space are lying,
Wherein they fancy intersperses
Long avenues of universes,
While Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one finite, unbounded homoloid,
And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed. (1878)
A parody of Shelley as 'A Paradoxical Ode', quoted in Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (1882), 649-650.
Science quotes on:  |  Avenue (14)  |  Destroy (189)  |  Dimension (64)  |  Fancy (50)  |  Find (1014)  |  Finite (60)  |  Infinite (243)  |  Intellect (251)  |  Knot (11)  |  Last (425)  |  Liquid (50)  |  Long (778)  |  Lying (55)  |  Poem (104)  |  Soul (235)  |  Space (523)  |  Think (1122)  |  Tool (129)  |  Universe (900)  |  Unseen (23)  |  Void (31)

The vortices of Descartes, gave way to the gravitation of Newton... One generation blows bubbles, and the next breaks them.
From Letter (29 Sep 1783) to Rev. William Unwin, collected in William Cowper and William Hayley (ed.), The Life, and Posthumous Writings, of William Cowper (1803), Vol. 3, 196.
Science quotes on:  |  Blow (45)  |  Break (109)  |  Bubble (23)  |  René Descartes (83)  |  Generation (256)  |  Gravitation (72)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Next (238)  |  Way (1214)

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space. Everything else is merely thought to exist. The worlds are unlimited. They come into being and perish. Nothing can come into being from that which is not nor pass away into that which is not. Further, the atoms are unlimited in size and number, and they are borne along in the whole universe in a vortex, and thereby generate all composite things—-fire, water, air, earth. For even these are conglomerations of given atoms. And it is because of their solidarity that these atoms are impassive and unalterable. The sun and the moon have been composed of such smooth and spherical masses [i.e. atoms], and so also the soul, which is identical with reason.
Diogenes Laertius IX, 44. Trans. R. D. Hicks (1925), Vol. 2, 453-5. An alternate translation of the opening is "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion."
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Atom (381)  |  Being (1276)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Empty (82)  |  Everything (489)  |  Exist (458)  |  Fire (203)  |  First (1302)  |  Identical (55)  |  Impassive (2)  |  Matter (821)  |  Merely (315)  |  Moon (252)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Number (710)  |  Pass (241)  |  Perish (56)  |  Principle (530)  |  Reason (766)  |  Smooth (34)  |  Soul (235)  |  Space (523)  |  Sun (407)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thought (995)  |  Universe (900)  |  Unlimited (24)  |  Water (503)  |  Whole (756)  |  World (1850)

The vortex theory [of the atom] is only a dream. Itself unproven, it can prove nothing, and any speculations founded upon it are mere dreams about dreams.
Quoted in Henry Smith Williams, 'Some Unsolved Scientific Problems', Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1899-1900), Vol. 100, 779.
Science quotes on:  |  Atom (381)  |  Dream (222)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Proof (304)  |  Prove (261)  |  Speculation (137)  |  Theory (1015)  |  Unproven (5)

When the Heavens were a little blue Arch, stuck with Stars, methought the Universe was too straight and close: I was almost stifled for want of Air: but now it is enlarged in height and breadth, and a thousand Vortex’s taken in. I begin to breathe with more freedom, and I think the Universe to be incomparably more magnificent than it was before.
In A Plurality of Worlds (1688), 126, as translated by Mr. Glanvill.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Arch (12)  |  Begin (275)  |  Blue (63)  |  Breadth (15)  |  Breathe (49)  |  Close (77)  |  Enlarge (37)  |  Freedom (145)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Heavens (125)  |  Height (33)  |  Incomparable (14)  |  Little (717)  |  Magnificent (46)  |  More (2558)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Stifled (2)  |  Straight (75)  |  Stuck (5)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thought (995)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Universe (900)  |  Want (504)


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.