Magni Formica Laboris

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. - Laplace, Introduction to the Essai . ... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great numbe...

"The traditional term 'natural philosopher' may be aptly applied to a scientist who was also a scholar, deeply conscious of the historical roots and philosophical import of his physics." - Harman "Around 1850 the science of physics came to be defined in terms of the unifying role of the concept of energy and the programme of mechanical explanation. Quantification, the search for mathematical laws, and precision measurement, the attainment of accurate values in experimentation, came to be seen as normative in physical science." (Harman 3) [Remember the two pivotal statements Rynasiewicz made about history of science: 1. There is no philosophy of science without a history of science; 2. If you want to study history, there are three central texts that must be read (and to which almost all other historical texts refer): Ptolemy's Almagest , Newton's Principia , and Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism .] "Maxwell urged caution ...