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Sir George Gabriel Stokes
(13 Aug 1819 - 1 Feb 1903)
British theoretical physicist known for his law of viscosity, and for Stokes' theorem, in vector analysis. Stokes also worked in optics, investigated the nature of fluorescence and was a founder of geodesy with his study of variations in gravity.
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Science Quotes by Sir George Gabriel Stokes (2 quotes)
But we have reason to think that the annihilation of work is no less a physical impossibility than its creation, that is, than perpetual motion.
— Sir George Gabriel Stokes
'On the Change of Refrangibility of Light' (1852). In Mathematical and Physical Papers (1901), Vol. 3, 397.
I am almost inclined to coin a word and call the appearance fluorescence, from fluor-spar, as the analogous term opalescence is derived from the name of a mineral.
— Sir George Gabriel Stokes
Footnote in 'On The Change of Refrangibility of Light', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1852), 142, 479. From the mineral fluor-spar, Humphry Davy named fluorine. The mineral, now called fluorite (calcium fluorite), was named was by Georg Agricola in 1546. The German flusse, flow, was applied because it melts easily, and is now important as a flux.
Quotes by others about Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1)
I venture to assert that the feelings one has when the beautiful symbolism of the infinitesimal calculus first gets a meaning, or when the delicate analysis of Fourier has been mastered, or while one follows Clerk Maxwell or Thomson into the strange world of electricity, now growing so rapidly in form and being, or can almost feel with Stokes the pulsations of light that gives nature to our eyes, or track with Clausius the courses of molecules we can measure, even if we know with certainty that we can never see them I venture to assert that these feelings are altogether comparable to those aroused in us by an exquisite poem or a lofty thought.
In paper (May 1891) read before Bath Branch of the Teachers’ Guild, published in The Practical Teacher (July 1891), reprinted as 'Geometry', in Frederic Spencer, Chapters on the Aims and Practice of Teaching (1897), 194.
See also:
- 13 Aug - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Stokes's birth.
- The Correspondence between Sir George Gabriel Stokes and Sir William Thomson, by David B. Wilson (ed.). - book suggestion.
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) -- 
