— William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Henry VI, Part 2, IV, ii, 64.
The judge then went
on to speak of self-paste learning, and it was then that we realised that the worthy
jurist, for all his worthiness, did not have a glue.
— Duncan Bain (1944 – ) ‘First let’s kill all the lawyers’, in A Manual Cant, Breek-Anathema Press, 1988.
The very concept of
‘laws of nature’ is, in contemporary usage, both a product and an expression of
the absence of reflectivity. It introduces into the study of nature a metaphor indelibly
marked by its political origins.
— Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 – 2023), Reflections
on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, 1985, 131.
LAW I
Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right [straight]
line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it …
LAW II
The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made
in the direction of the right [straight] line in which the force is impressed …
LAW III
To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions
of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts …
COROLLARY I
A body, acted upon by two forces simultaneously, will describe the diagonal of a
parallelogram in the same time as it would describe the sides by those forces separately
…
— Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727), Principia Mathematica,
1687. [Newton’s Laws]
Each planet travels
in an elliptical orbit with the Sun at one focus.
For a given planet
orbit, the vector to the Sun sweeps equal areas in equal times.
For any two planets,
the squares of the periods are proportional to the cubes of the distances from the
Sun.
— Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), Kepler’s Laws.
Volumi eguali di gas nelle stesse condizioni
di temperatura e di pressione contengono lo stesso numero di molecole. (Equal volumes of gas under the same conditions
of temperature and pressure contain the same number of molecules.)
— Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Avogadro (1776 – 1856), a lawyer, proposes ‘Avogadro’s Hypothesis’,
now called ‘Avogadro’s Law’.
The important point
is not the bigness of Avogadro’s number, but the bigness of Avogadro.
— Henry Albert Bent (1926 – 2015), The Second
Law, OUP, 1965.
God did not create
the planets and the stars with the intention that they should dominate man, but
that they, like other creatures, should obey and serve him
— Paracelsus, Concerning the Nature of Things,
c. 1541.
The pious Jew or Moslem
abhors pork without being conscious that it was awareness of the danger of trichinosis
which probably caused his law-makers to impose the prohibition.
— Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, University
paperbacks, 1967, 60.
There are ignorant
people who speak flowery words and take delight in the letter of the law, saying
that there is nothing else.
— Bhagavad Gita, 2:42, in the translation
of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.
A new scientific truth
does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but
rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that
is familiar with it.
— Max Planck (1858 – 1947), quoted in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, 151.
Scientific law is
of a totally different nature from civil law; it does not involve an intelligent
lawgiver, a command, and a corresponding duty. It is a brief description in mental
shorthand of as wide a range as possible of the sequences of our sense-impressions.
— Karl Pearson (1857 – 1936), The Grammar
of Science, Everyman edition, 98.
You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.
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