|
Jacques Rohault
(1618 - 27 Dec 1672)
French philosopher, physicist and mathematician who popularized René Descartes's natural philosophy in France, through a series of extremely popular lectures in the mid-1650s. Rohault emphasized experiment and observation, but omitted the metaphysical foundations that were set by Descartes. Rohaults’s Traité de Physique (Treatise on Physics, 1671) became the leading textbook of the age on natural philosophy as an observational discipline, but avoided detailed mathematics.
|
Science Quotes by Jacques Rohault (1 quote)
If it be true, that some Chymists have now and then converted Lead into Gold, it was by just such a hazard, as if a man should let fall a handful of sand upon a table and the particles of it should be so ranged that we could read distinctly on it a whole page of Virgil’s Ænead.
— Jacques Rohault
In Traité de Physique, (1671, 1676), Part. 3, Chap. 6, 186. As translated in Rohault’s System of Natural Philosophy (1723), Part 3, Chap. 6, 154. From the original French, “Que s’il est vray que quelques Chymistes ayent autrefois converty du plomb en or, ça esté par un hazard aussi grand, que si ayant laissé tomber de haut une poignée de sable sur une table, ses gains s'estoient tellement rangez, qu'on y pût lire distinctement une page de l'Eneide de Virgile.”
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) -- 
