"Laplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... corpuscular theory of light, determined the function (n^2-1), where n is the refractive index, to be the expression for the refractive power; dividing this expression by the density (d), he obtained (n^2-1)/d, which he named the "absolute refractive power." To P.S. Laplace is due the theoretical proof that this function is independent of temperature and pressure, and apparent experimental confirmation was provided by Biot and Arago's, and by Dulong's observations ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... which are not touched by Mr. Darwin, namely, the origin of the present form of the solar system, and that of living matter. Full justice is done to Kant, as the originator of that "cosmic gas theory," as the Germans somewhat quaintly call it, which is commonly ascribed to Laplace. With respect to spontaneous generation, while admitting that there is no experimental evidence in its favour, Professor Haeckel denies the possibility of disproving it, and points out that the assumption that it has occurred is a necessary part of the doctrine ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... thousand years old? Are all those ages of past {17} history, when the earth and the sun were but nebulae, a mere imagination, or did that nebulous mass come into existence thousands or millions of years afterwards when Kant or Laplace first conceived that it had existed? The supposition is clearly self-contradictory and impossible. If Science be not a mass of illusion, this planet existed millions of years before any human—or, so far as we know, any animal minds—existed ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... matter," says Kant, "and I will build the world;" and he proceeds to deduce from the simple data from which he starts, a doctrine in all essential respects similar to the well-known "Nebular Hypothesis" of Laplace.[13] He accounts for the relation of the masses and the densities of the planets to their distances from the sun, for the eccentricities of their orbits, for their rotations, for their satellites, for the general agreement in the direction of rotation among the celestial ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... say would, after this, convince the Nawab that there was any virtue in telescopes; his religions feeling had been greatly excited against them; and had Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and the Herschels, all been present to defend them, they would not have altered his opinion of their demerits. The old man has, I believe, a shrewd suspicion that they are inventions of the devil to lead men from the right way; and were he told all that these great men have ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... poor, when cataloguing the resolved nebula of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require, and so to anticipate, the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say, here was a more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole scale of the ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... part of his duty to prepare eloges of deceased Academicians. Of his collected works in fourteen volumes, 'Oeuvres de Francois Arago,' published in Paris, 1865, three volumes are given to these 'Notices Biographiques.' Here may be found the biographies of Bailly, Sir William Herschel, Laplace, Joseph Fourier, Carnot, Malus, Fresnel, Thomas Young, and James Watt; which, translated rather carelessly into English, have been published under the title 'Biographies of Distinguished Men,' and can be found ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... flourish of trumpets and its general hurrah-boys. But he is unmoved by the apostrophe to the "Evening Star" from the same opera. For this, in passing through the piano-player, is almost reduced to a frigid astronomical basis. The singer is no longer Scotti or Bispham, but Herschel or Laplace. The operator may pump and switch until he breaks his heart—but if he has any real musical instinct, he will surely grow to feel a sense of lack in this sort of music. So for the present, while confidently awaiting the invention of an improved piano-player, which ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... attempted to explain the origin of the universe on purely mechanical lines. Laplace, a French mathematician, about the same time came to similar conclusions as Kant had done, and published his views in his work on Exposition du Systeme du Monde, and later on in his more famous work the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... conceived to be true, is followed, regardless of startling presentments, the Vestiges call to mind the Mecanique Celeste, or Systeme du Monde. In caution, as in science, the author is immeasurably inferior to LAPLACE; but in magnitude and boldness of design he transcends the illustrious Frenchman. LAPLACE sought no more than to subject the celestial movements to the formulas of analysis, and reconcile to common observation terrestrial appearances; but our author is far more ambitious—more ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... drills, broaches, screw-drivers, and counter-sink with eight ounces of screws: silver patella wire, and 1 pair Peter's bone forceps. 2 aneurism needles, 1 bullet probe, 1 pair Egyptian Army pattern bullet forceps. 4 Lane's and 3 pairs Makins's bowel clamps, Nos. 3 4 and 5 Laplace's bowel forceps, 6 Murphy's buttons, 1 pair Morris's retractors, 6 dozen intestine needles, 2 Macphail's needle-holders, Nos. 4 5 6 Thomas's slot-eyed needles, 1 mouth gag, 1 Durham's double raspatory, 3 strong ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... wrote a letter to the Persian ambassador in that magnate's own language. After these linguistic contests, he early turned to mathematics, in which he was apparently self-taught; yet, in his seventeenth year he discovered an error in Laplace's Mecanique Celeste. He entered Trinity College where he won all kinds of distinctions, being famous not merely as a mathematician, but as a poet, a scholar, and a metaphysician. He was appointed Professor of Astronomy ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... childhood and youth these great but formless" (why "formless"?) "evolutionary ideas were brewing and fermenting. The scientific society of his elders and of the contemporaries among whom he grew up was permeated with the leaven of Laplace and Lamarck, of Hutton and of Herschel. Inquiry was especially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific distinctions among plants and animals. Those who believed in the doctrine of Buffon and of the 'Zoonomia,' and those who disbelieved in it, alike, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... college career, Newton's attention seems to have been mainly directed to mathematics. Here he began to give evidence of that marvellous insight into the deep secrets of nature which more than a century later led so dispassionate a judge as Laplace to pronounce Newton's immortal work as pre-eminent above all the productions of the human intellect. But though Newton was one of the very greatest mathematicians that ever lived, he was never a mathematician for the mere sake ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... mere mechanics. The Newtonian theory is an analysis of the elementary movements which in their combination determine the planetary orbits, and gives the formula of the proportions according to which they act. But the Cartesian theory, like the later speculations of Kant and Laplace, proposes to give a hypothetical explanation of the circumstances and motions which in the normal course of things led to the state of things required by the law of attraction. In the judgment of D'Alembert the Cartesian theory was the best that the observations of the age admitted; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Choisies, 300, 301. Regles pour la Direction de l'Esprit. La connaissance de la methode qui a guide l'homme de genie n'est pas moins utile au progres de la science et meme a sa propre gloire, que ses decouvertes.—LAPLACE, Systeme du Monde, ii. 371. On ne fait rien sans idees preconcues, il faut avoir seulement la sagesse de ne croire a leurs deductions qu'autant que l'experience les confirme. Les idees preconcues, soumises au controle severe de l'experimentation, sont la ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... the supernumerary does not last long. A youth enlightened by gleams by Parisian life soon measures the frightful distance that separates him from the head-clerkship, a distance which no mathematician, neither Archimedes, nor Leibnitz, nor Laplace has ever reckoned, the distance that exists between 0 and the figure 1. He begins to perceive the impossibilities of his career; he hears talk of favoritism; he discovers the intrigues of officials: he sees the questionable means by which his superiors have pushed ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... KANT and LAPLACE, of the nebular origin of the spheres, and the deductions consequent thereupon, in regard to the progressive stages through which the earth in its developments has passed, was pernicious in its influence in diverting the minds of investigators from other and truer channels. To the blind ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... literature of France could boast of many men of great talent, such as La Harpe, who died during the Consulate, Ducis, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chenier, and Lemercier, yet they could not be compared with Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, and Cuvier, whose labours have so prodigiously extended the limits of human knowledge. No one, therefore, could murmur at seeing the class of sciences in the Institute take precedence of its elder sister. Besides, the First Consul was not sorry to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... computer. The men beside me were Professor Joseph Winlock, the superintendent, and Mr. John D. Runkle, the senior assistant in the office. I talked of my unsuccessful attempt to master the "Mecanique Celeste" of Laplace without other preparation than that afforded by the most meagre text-books of elementary mathematics of that period. Runkle spoke of the translator as "the Captain." So familiar a designation of the great Bowditch—LL. D. and a member of the Royal ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... insurances, lotteries, &c., but also the determination of future events from observations made relative to events of the same nature. This subject of inquiry dates only from the 17th century, and occupied the minds of Pascal, Huygens, Fermot, Bernouilli, Laplace, Fourier, Lacroix, Poisson, De Moivre; and in more modern times, Cournot, Quetelet, and Professor ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... views generally entertained by writers on the subject. We are induced to refer to the topic, to point out what seems to us a harsh measure dealt out to the undulatory theory of light—harsh when compared with the reception given to a theory of Laplace, having for its object to account for the origin of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... attention, laid the book down after a cursory glance with the remark that it was only fit for children, its propositions being self-evident. Yet to those truisms Newton added very little. His work lay in their development and application. Laplace and Biot belong to our own day; but their task, too, consisted in the employment of old rules. The most effective tools of the mathematician are framed from the Arab algebra and Napier's logarithms. The science ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... would prove that there is no use at all in education. Why should we put boys out of their way? Why should we force a lad, who would much rather fly a kite or trundle a hoop, to learn his Latin Grammar? Why should we keep a young man to his Thucydides or his Laplace, when he would much rather be shooting? Education would be mere useless torture, if, at two or three and twenty, a man who had neglected his studies were exactly on a par with a man who had applied himself to them, exactly as likely to perform ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lived. Astronomy gave her a long career; she discovered no less than seven comets herself, and her patient labors preserved her to the age of ninety-eight.—And Mrs. Somerville, to whom we owe the English translation of Laplace's Mecanique celeste, of whom Humboldt said, "In pure mathematics, Mrs. Somerville is absolutely superior." Like Caroline Herschel, she was almost a centenarian, appearing always much younger than her years: she died at Naples, in 1872, at the age of ninety-two.—So, too, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... chasm between the crystal and the non-nucleated cell? I do not. As I sat alone last night unable to sleep, my eyes ran over the backs of the books on my shelves—they were all there, all the great ones, Laplace, Spinoza, Descartes, Goethe, Spencer, Hegel, Kant, Darwin, all the wonder-workers. How masterful each had been in his time. How complacent of praise; how critical of the past! But here now they all stood gathering dust, and I thought: so ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... indistinguishable parts of the solar mass. When the great mass of the sun, increased by the relatively small mass of all the planets put together, was spread out in this way, it was a rare vapour or gas. At the period where the question is taken up in Laplace's treatment of the nebular theory, the shape of this mass is regarded as spheroidal; but at an earlier period its shape may well have been as irregular as that of any of the nebulae which we now see in distant parts of the heavens, for, whatever its primitive shape, the equalization ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... this is a fault so rare in modern literature that it almost amounts to a distinction. However, Phyllis Browne has managed to crowd into the narrow limits at her disposal a great many interesting anecdotes. The picture she gives of Mrs. Somerville working away at her translation of Laplace in the same room with her children is very charming, and reminds one of what is told of George Sand; there is an amusing account of Mrs. Somerville's visit to the widow of the young Pretender, the Countess ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... duty, as President of the Geological Society, to deliver the Anniversary Address, [5] I chose a topic which involved a very careful study of the remarkable cosmogonical speculation, originally promulgated by Immanuel Kant and, subsequently, by Laplace, which is now known as the nebular hypothesis. With the help of such little acquaintance with the principles of physics and astronomy as I had gained, I endeavoured to obtain a clear understanding of this speculation in all its bearings. I am not sure that I succeeded; ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... absurdities. I feel sure that Hill was a benefactor of the Royal Society; and much more than he would have been if he had softened their errors and enhanced their praises. No reviewer will object to me that I have omitted Young, Laplace, etc. But then my book has a true title. Hill should not have called his a ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Huga! the male of the species is more than enough. We must look upon any wide departure from the prevailing pattern either as a monstrosity or as a development of the great plan; therefore, if one of these women is a monstrosity, Laplace and Aristotle are to be considered equally so. And then, also, Mr. Reade, masculine as he is, finds eclipse in the shade of either Mrs. Lewes, (Marion Evans,) or Charlotte Bronte, or Madame Dudevant. As for men, they are themselves just emerging from barbarism; a race rises only with its women, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... version of the romance of Nature, we descend from the consideration of orb-filled space and the character of the universal elements, to trace the history of our own globe. And we find that this falls significantly into connection with the primary order of things suggested by Laplace's theory of the origin of the solar system in a vast nebula or fire-mist, which for ages past has been condensing under the influence of gravitation and the radiation ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... noted firm of bankers, Prime, Ward & King, of New York; and afterwards represented our government in Brazil. He was an accomplished linguist, familiar with several languages, ancient and modern. He was a profound mathematician, and had read, without the assistance of Bowditch's translation, Laplace's celebrated work, the "Mecanique Celeste." He passed most of his time during the sessions of Congress in Washington, looking after the interests of bankers and others in New York, as they might be affected by pending legislation. Though called "King of the Lobby," he had ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... Napoleon as to men of science, it was to have been expected that he would endeavour to strengthen his administration by calling them to his aid. Some of his appointments proved failures, while others were completely successful. Thus Laplace was made Minister of the Interior; but he had no sooner been appointed than it was seen that a mistake had been made. Napoleon afterwards said of him, that "Laplace looked at no question in its true point ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... ruins made by Lord Rosse, are in sidereal astronomy, which is almost wholly a growth of modern times; and the particular part of it demolished by the new telescope, is almost exclusively the creation of the two Herschels, father and son. Laplace, it is true, adopted their views; and he transferred them to the particular service of our own planetary system. But he gave to them no new sanction, except what arises from showing that they would account for the appearances, as they present themselves to our ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... planets, and generally of the vast amount of matter in the form of meteor-rings and meteoric dust in and around our system, have all pointed to a different origin for the planets and their satellites than that formulated by Laplace as the ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... toleration in the new world were the catholics in Maryland. The reverend gentleman has stated also that infidelity has done nothing for the world in the development of art and science. Has he ever heard of Darwin, of Tyndall, of Huxley, of John W. Draper, of Auguste Comte, of Descartes, Laplace, Spinoza, or any man who has taken a step in advance of his time? Orthodoxy never advances, when it does advance, it ceases to ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... is seeking the Kingdom of Heaven within you. "God is Spirit and they that worship Him must worship in Spirit and Truth." LAPLACE, the great astronomer, asserted that he had swept the heavens with his telescope and found neither God nor Heaven. Yes, poor LAPLACE! He looked for God objectively instead ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... he is endeavouring to discover the origin and laws of the most occult phenomena. The process is, and always must be, the same; and precisely the same mode of reasoning was employed by Newton [90] and Laplace [91] in their endeavours to discover and define the causes of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as you, with your own common sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The only difference is, that the nature ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... therefore free from all limitations; He is apprehended not by the senses, but by the soul; hence God is above sensuous perceptions. 1 Cor. 2:6-16 intimates that without the teaching of God's Spirit we cannot know God. He is not a material Being. "LaPlace swept the heavens with his telescope, but could not find anywhere a God. He might just as well have swept a kitchen with his broom." Since God is not a material Being, He cannot ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... being a consequence of that will, are perfectly and unalterably balanced. Newton seemed to apprehend, that in the laws of the planetary motions there was a principle which would ultimately be the cause of the destruction of the system. Laplace, by pursuing and refining the principles of our great philosopher, has proved that what appeared sources of disorder are, in fact, the perfecting machinery of the system, and that the principle of conservation is as eternal as ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... survey or cadastre has been in progress for many years. It was first suggested in 1763, and after an interval of thirty years, during which no progress was made, it was renewed by the government of that day, and individuals of the highest scientific reputation, MM. Lagrange, Laplace, and Delambre, were consulted with respect to the best mode of carrying into effect the intention of government. Subsequent events suspended any effectual operations in the French cadastre till the year 1802, when a school of topographical ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... efforts, which were the more deserving because I had to work alone, led to almost nothing in that congenial calling, I would begin it all over again if I could. I should love to be conversing for the first time with Leibnitz and Newton, with Laplace and Lagrange, with Cuvier and Jussieu, even if I had afterwards to solve that other arduous problem: how to procure one's daily bread. Ah, young men, my successors, what an easy time you have of it today! If you don't know it, then let me tell ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the telegraph conveyed to Paris information of the discovery of a comet, by M. Gambart, at Marseilles: the message arrived during a sitting of the French Board of Longitude, and was sent in a note from the Minister of the Interior to Laplace, the President, who received it whilst the writer of these lines was sitting by his side. The object in this instance was, to give the earliest publicity to the fact, and to assure to M. Gambart the title ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... centres of culture or of artistic handicraft—in Oxford, Munich, Florence, Venice, Rome. There is only one Grand Canal and only one Pitti Palace. We must have Shakespeare, Homer, Catullus, Dante; we must have Phidias, Fra Angelico, Rafael, Mendelssohn; we must have Aristotle, Newton, Laplace, Spencer. But after all these, and before all these, there is something more left to learn. Having first read them, we must read ourselves out of them. We must forget all this formal modern life; ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... young girl who had taken refuge in the town of Lasalle, one of the places granted to the houseless villagers as an asylum, asked and received formal permission from the captain of the Soissonais regiment, by name Laplace, to go home on important private business, on condition that they returned the same night. They promised, and in the intention of keeping this promise they all met on their way back at a small farmhouse. Just as they reached it a terrible storm came on. The men were for continuing ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the inevitable derivatives of the combined properties of the various chemical elements which constitute protoplasm. Biologists have known for more than a century, since the work of Lavoisier and Laplace in 1780, that the fundamental process of the living mechanism is oxidation, and that this process is the same, as they said, for the burning candle and the guinea pig. Beginning with Woehler, in 1828, scores of students of physiological chemistry have duplicated the chemical ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... you recollect the reply of Laplace, when Napoleon asked him why there was no mention of God in his 'Mecanique Celeste?' 'Sire, je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese.' I was not sufficiently insane to base my religion of beauty upon a holiness that was buried in the tomb supplied by Joseph of Arimathea,—that ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... infinitesimal degree, or the world rotate more slowly, the poles would be submerged and the equator become an arid waste. No balance, turning to 1/1000 of a grain, is more delicate than the poise of forces on the world. Laplace has given us proof that the period of the earth's axial rotation has not changed 1/100 of a second of time in ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... scientific importance of his later life-long labours; but it must suffice to say briefly upon this point that Herschel's work was no mere mechanical star-finding; it was the most profoundly philosophical astronomical work ever performed, except perhaps Newton's and Laplace's. Among astronomers proper there has been none distinguished by such breadth of grasp, such wide conceptions, and such perfect clearness of view as the self-taught ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... 15, Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace, one of the greatest mathematicians and physical astronomers of all time, died at Arcueil. Laplace was born in 1749, in Normandy. Although a poor farmer's son, he soon won the position of a teacher at the Beaumont Military ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... be asked at once, Do you mean to say that there is no difference between the habit of mind of a mathematician and that of a naturalist? Do you imagine that Laplace might have been put into the Jardin des Plantes, and Cuvier into the Observatory, with equal advantage to the progress of the sciences ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... which, addressing herself to M. de Fresne, she said, laughing, "There now, you see, with a little ingenuity one may manage anything."—"Yes, faith, madame," said the good man, "as far as regards the soup I am satisfied."—LAPLACE's "Collection," vol. ii., ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... success; and 'I remarked,' said the astronomer, 'his hypocrisy in concluding the conversation on astronomy by observing how all these glorious views gave proofs of an Almighty Wisdom.' I asked him if he thought the system of LAPLACE to be quite certain, with regard to the total security of the planetary system from the effects of gravitation losing its present balance? He said, No; he thought by no means that the universe was secured from the chance of sudden losses ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... and is still being published. A number of the courses of lectures delivered at L'Ecole Polytechnique and at L'Ecole Normale appeared in the early volumes of this journal. The fact that some of these courses were given by such eminent mathematicians as J. L. Lagrange, G. Monge, and P. S. Laplace is sufficient guarantee of their great value and of their good influence on the later textbooks along similar lines. In particular, it may be noted that G. Monge gave the first course in descriptive geometry at L'Ecole Normale ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... velocity of sound enunciated by Newton on purely mechanical considerations, was found wrong by one-sixth. The error remained unaccounted for until the time of Laplace, who, suspecting that the heat disengaged by the compression of the undulating strata of the air, gave additional elasticity, and so produced the difference, made the needful calculations and found he was right. Thus acoustics was arrested until thermology ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... were originally known as "resultants," a name applied to them by Pierre Simon Laplace, but now replaced by the title "determinants," a name first applied to certain forms of them by Carl Friedrich Gauss. The germ of the theory of determinants is to be found in the writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1693), who incidentally ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... doit prendre.—DESCARTES, OEuvres Choisies, 300, 301. Regles pour la Direction de l'Esprit. La connaissance de la methode qui a guide l'homme de genie n'est pas moins utile an progres de la science et meme a sa propre gloire, que ses decouvertes.—LAPLACE. Systeme du Monde, ii. 371. On ne fait rien sans idees preconcues, il faut avoir seulement la sagesse de ne croire a leurs deductions qu'autant que l'experience les confirme. Les idees preconcues, soumises au ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... bodies; and that, supposing the double effect to be continued to infinity, the moon would end by one day falling into the earth. However, they became reassured as to the fate of future generations on being apprised that, according to the calculations of Laplace, this acceleration of motion is confined within very restricted limits, and that a proportional diminution of speed will be certain to succeed it. So, then, the stability of the solar system would not be ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... hard work in the fields. Evenings I read the books which Mr. Wright had loaned to me, Blackstone's Commentaries and Greenleaf on Evidence and a translation by Doctor Bowditch of LaPlace's Mecanique Celeste. The latter I read aloud. I mention it because in a way it served as an antidote for that growing sense of expansion in my intellect. In the vastness of infinite space I found the littleness of ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... postdate Guyau's prediction by a hundred years, we might say, with them in our minds, that the twentieth century "will end with discoveries as ill-formulated but perhaps as important in the moral world as those of Newton and Laplace in the astronomical world." But, though we have much to hope from them, that is no reason why we should look to them for everything and abandon in their favour that which has brought us where we are. The choice of which we spoke, between the brain and ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Servien," he said presently; "in these lines Virgil, or rather the poet of the Alexandrine age who was his model, has anticipated Laplace's great hypothesis and Charles Lyell's theories. He shows cosmic matter, that negative something from which everything must come, condensing to make worlds, the plastic rind of the globe consolidating; then the ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... in the moon as material for amusement, that we may track him through the mythic maze, where, in well-nigh every language, he has left some traces of his existence. As there is a side of the moon which we have never seen, and according to Laplace never shall see, there is also an aspect of the matter in hand that remains to be traversed, if we would circumambulate its entire extent. Our subject must now be viewed in the magic mirror of mythology. The antiquarian Ritson shall state the question to be brought before our honourable ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... altogether. "I have swept the heavens with my telescope," said Lalande, "and I have not found your God." "The heavens are telling no more the glory of God," said Auguste Comte, "but that of Herschel and Laplace." Is it indeed so? The past has done all in its power to make it so, and Lalande and Comte represent the inevitable and natural reaction against the incredible puerilities, the stupid, obstinate opposition to all science ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Laplace, by a heat and cold theory, tried to account for the 174 feet, and supposed that in the condensed portion of a sound wave heat was generated, and in the rarefied portion cold was produced; the heat augmenting the elasticity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... honoured, respected, remunerated. But the prophet gets no thanks, and perhaps does mankind no benefit. He sees too quick. And there can be very little good indeed in so seeing. If one of us had been an astronomer, and had discovered the laws of Kepler, Newton, and Laplace in the thirteenth century, I think he would have been wise to keep the discovery to himself for a few hundred years or so. Otherwise, he would have been burned for his trouble. Galileo, long after, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... knew everything, inspired man, in the childhood of the world, with a fabulous and inaccurate theory of the origin of man and the earth, and that since that day the same God has gradually changed or added to the inspiration, until He inspired Laplace, and Galileo, and Copernicus, and Darwin to contradict the teachings of the previous fifty thousand years. He asks us to believe that God muddled men's minds with a mysterious series of revelations cloaked ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... has generally been regarded as an older or more advanced planet than the earth. The first reason is that, accepting Laplace's theory of the origin of the planetary system from a series of rings left off at the periphery of the contracting solar nebula, Mars must have come into existence earlier than the earth, because, being more distant from the center of the system, the ring ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... route to Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he met Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and saw Talma act, and, what was of more moment, had his first glimpse of the Continent and the city of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder. Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between Irving's house and his own neighbouring ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... composed of half-truths, were mingled with glaring errors and fantastic misconceptions, but were none the less germinal. Leibnitz was the first to propose the nebular hypothesis, which was more fully elaborated by Kant and Laplace. Buffon, influenced by the writing of Leibnitz, in his Theorie de la Terre, published in 1749, adopted his notion of an original volcanic nucleus and a universal ocean, the latter as he thought leaving the land dry by draining into ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... science, M. de Lagrange, M. de Laplace, M. Monge, did not disdain to wrench themselves from their learned calculations in order to second the useful labors of Lavoisier. Bold voyagers were scouring the world, pioneers of those enterprises of discovery which had appeared for a while abandoned during the seventeenth century. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a talent for calculation—in the portraits of Euler, Kepler, Laplace, Gassendi, &c., and in George Bidder, Humboldt, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... if they represent stars in process of condensation, they must be giving birth to huge agglomerations of stars—to star clusters at least. These vast and enigmatic objects do not throw much light on the origin of our own solar system. The nebular hypothesis, which was invented by Laplace to explain the origin of our solar system, has not yet met with universal acceptance. The explanation offers grave difficulties, and it is best while the subject is still being closely investigated, to hold all opinions ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... moon would one day end by falling into the earth. However, they were obliged to reassure themselves and cease to fear for future generations when they were told that according to the calculations of Laplace, an illustrious French mathematician, this acceleration of movement was restricted within very narrow limits, and that a proportional diminution will follow it. Thus the equilibrium of the solar world cannot be disturbed ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... replied Monsieur De Kock, thus addressed—"a thousand pardons! I had no intention of offending. Ma'm'selle Laplace—Monsieur De Kock will do himself the honor of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... American mathematician, born at Salem, Massachusetts; a practical scientist; published "Practical Navigation," translated the "Mecanique Celeste" of Laplace, accompanied with ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... materialism, ready to grasp the chance of self-expression. Whence the automatic return to the dream of universal arithmetic, which Laplace, Du Bois-Reymond, and Huxley have expressed with ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... Laplace, being struck by the fact that the "lesser light" did not rule the night to anything like the same extent that the "greater light" ruled the day, set to work to examine the conditions under which it might have been made to do so. The result of his ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... highest reaches in the science of music; for his mind seems to have grasped all its resources, and to have embodied them with austere purity and precision of form. As Spenser is called the poet for poets, and Laplace the mathematician for mathematicians, so Bach is the musician for musicians. While Handel may be considered a purely independent and parallel growth, it is not too much to assert that without Sebastian Bach and his matchless studies for the piano, organ, and orchestra, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... these proceedings the French frigate "Artemise," Captain Laplace, was ordered to Honolulu, where it arrived July ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... us, comes at last to be done without effort and almost unconsciously. Great minds thus travel over vast fields of thought with an ease of which they are themselves unaware. Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch once said that in translating the "Mecanique Celeste," he had come upon formulas which Laplace introduced with the word "obviously," where it took nevertheless many days of hard study to supply the intermediate steps through which that transcendent mind had passed with one huge leap of inference. At some time in his youth no doubt ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... truly distinguished Frenchman of the older generations whose name has not been given to a street in Paris. Of the men of science thus honored, one recalls off-hand the names of Buffon, Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Pinel, Esquirol, Lamarck, Laplace, Lavoisier, Arago, Claude Bernard, Broca—indeed, one could readily extend the list to tiresome dimensions. Moreover, it is a list that is periodically increased by the addition of new names, as occasion offers, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... these erratic bodies, let us turn to the more familiar and important members of the Solar System. It was the remarkable harmony among their movements which first made Laplace conceive that the Sun, planets, and satellites had resulted from a common genetic process. As Sir William Herschel, by his observations on the nebulae, was led to the conclusion that stars resulted from the aggregation of diffused matter; so Laplace, by his observations ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of treating political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in physical science his notions of philosophizing might have recognised Kepler, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which the writer, at a later period, made the most ample and honourable amends), there was truth in several of his strictures on my father's treatment of the subject; that my father's premises were really too narrow, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... land is at last contested, and we are saddened inexpressibly, that, from the elevation they have reached, these two peers of civilization can descend to practise the barbarism of war, and especially that the laud of Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire, and Laplace must challenge to bloody duel the laud of Luther, Leibnitz, Kant, ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... Creation. Of these Geology is the most important, because it is able to bring forward unquestionable facts which are in direct opposition to the traditionary interpretation Astronomy and physiology have little to object except theoretical views; the hypotheses of Laplace and Darwin. These, however, will have to be carefully considered. It will be necessary for us first to ascertain whether there really exists any such fundamental discrepancy between the record and ascertained facts, or theories so far as they are supported ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... Cabanis, the friend of Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already claimed our notice, above, p. 215.] and Destutt de Tracy. M. Picavet has grouped around them, along with many obscurer names, the great scientific men of the time, like Laplace, Bichat, Lamarck, as all in the direct line of eighteenth century thought. "Ideologists" he calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now sometimes used to convey a criticism; for instance, to contrast the methods of Lamarck with those of Darwin.] Ideology, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... I was impatient to distinguish myself by carrying them further. This desire is so natural that almost every pupil leaving the Ecole fixes his eyes on that moral sun called Fame. The first thought of all is to become another Newton, or Laplace, or Vauban. Such are the efforts that France demands of the young men ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 1755, which for a long time remained unnoticed, and which was dedicated to Frederick II., developed the hypothesis (carried out forty years later by Laplace in ignorance of Kant's work) of the mechanical origin of the universe and of the motion of the planets. It presupposes merely the two forces of matter, attraction and repulsion, and its primitive chaotic condition, a world-mist ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... they have built up steadily with co-operating hands, the mental effect is quite different. The opening vista leads us on, with growing admiration and confidence in the unbreakable solidarity of mankind. We know that Newton who completes Galileo, Maxwell who follows Laplace, Helmholtz who uses the results of Joule, can have no conflicting jealousies. Here quite obviously and indisputably all are fellow-workers, and before the greatness of their work the passions of rival domination in material things, the differences of national taste and habit, the quarrels ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... of science pursues when he is endeavouring to discover the origin and laws of the most occult phenomena. The process is, and always must be, the same; and precisely the same mode of reasoning was employed by Newton and Laplace in their endeavours to discover and define the causes of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as you, with your own common sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The only difference is, that the nature ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... his proposition. As opposed to the fancies of Epicurus and his poet, Lucretius, or to modern atheistic doctrines of similar character, we have no qualification or condition to suggest which might change its force or significance. When we remember that the genius of such a man as Laplace shared the farthest flight of star-eyed science only to "waft us back the tidings of despair," we are thankful that so profound a student of Nature as Mr. Agassiz has tracked the warm foot-prints of Divinity throughout all the vestiges ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the year 1804, Laplace, at the Institute, proposed to take advantage of the means offered by aerostation to verify at great heights certain scientific points—as, for example, those which concern magnetism. This proposition was made at a favourable time, and was, so far, carried out in the best possible way. ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... these changes may be, they sink into insignificance beside the progress of physical science, whether we consider the improvement of methods of investigation, or the increase in bulk of solid knowledge. Consider that the labours of Laplace, of Young, of Davy, and of Faraday; of Cuvier, of Lamarck, and of Robert Brown; of Von Baer, and of Schwann; of Smith and of Hutton, have all been carried on since Priestley discovered oxygen; and consider that they are now things of the past, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... shown by LAPLACE in the Precis de l'Histoire de l'Astronomie, which forms the fifth book of his Exposition du Systeme du Monde (fifth edition). He gives a resume of what he believes to have been the chief results obtained by the Chaldaean astronomers (pp. 12-14 in the separate issue ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... with the usual party, or the invited guests, if there were any; one hour was devoted to this intercourse, which was generally shared by the First Consul's two brothers, Lucien and Joseph, Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely, Boulay (de la Meurthe), Monge, Berthollet, Laplace and Arnault. Toward noon Cambaceres arrived. As a general thing Bonaparte devoted half an hour to his chancellor; then suddenly, without warning, he would rise and say: "Au revoir, Josephine! au revoir, Hortense! Come, Bourrienne, let us ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... tables as originally calculated are based upon the hypothesis of a temperature and humidity which decrease regularly with the altitude, and this is not always the case; nor is the "static equilibrium of the atmosphere" which Laplace assumed always maintained; that is to say an equal difference of pressure does not always correspond to an equal difference of altitude. There is, in point of fact, no absolute way to determine altitude save by running an actual line of levels; all other ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... that different kinds of animal and vegetable life have followed one another on the surface, and that some of their remains are found in these strata now; and that all this has taken enormous periods of time. All this is exceedingly probable, because it is the way in which, as Laplace first pointed out, under well-established scientific laws of matter, particularly the law of gravitation and the law of the radiation of heat, a great fluid mass would necessarily change. And the whole solar system may and probably did come into its present condition in this way. It certainly could ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... know. We may fancy the infinitely little going through a cycle of evolution like that of the infinitely great, and solar systems developing and revolving inside of the ultimate atoms, but the Copernicus or the Laplace of the atomic astronomy has not yet appeared. The atom itself is an invention of science. To get the mystery of vitality reduced to the atom is getting it in very close quarters, but it is a very big mystery still. Just how the dead becomes alive, even in the atom, is mystery enough to stagger ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... the next century a still more profound genius, Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giving it, in the light of Newton's great utterances, a consistency which it never before had; and about the same time Laplace gave it yet greater strength by mathematical reasonings of wonderful power and extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea that our own solar system and others—suns, planets, satellites, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Sir Isaac Newton has been summed up for us thus by Laplace: "His work was pre-eminent above all other products of the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... superhuman intellect capable of making the calculation. Indeed, the scientists who have believed in the universality and perfect objectivity of mechanical explanations have, consciously or unconsciously, acted on a hypothesis of this kind. Laplace formulated it with the greatest precision: "An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces with which nature is animated, and the respective situations of the beings that compose nature—supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... astronomical treatise, for example, draws a veil of deceitful words over the profound faith of Kepler, and takes evident pleasure in throwing into relief the tokens of sympathy bestowed unfortunately by the learned Laplace upon atheism.[102] Here then we have open attempts to found a prejudice against religion on the authority of science; and these attempts disturb the minds of not a few. I ask two questions on this head. Is it true, in fact, that modern naturalists ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville |
