Bridgman Pw Quotes

The feeling of understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it any ostensibly scientific activity is as sterile as that of a high school student substituting numbers into a formula. For this reason, science, when I push the analysis back as far as I can, must be private. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

Coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

The hand is thought of as the slave of action. But the slave of action is the master of expression. ~ George B. Bridgman

Grace and truth are distinct and yet they are not mutually exclusive. But when people focus on one without the other, they usually fall into two extremes. They either embrace a gospel of "grace without truth" or a gospel of "truth without grace".
Grace without truth is not really grace. Truth without grace is not really truth. Grace without truth pampers. Truth without grace hammers.
Grace without truth is love without correction. Truth without grace is correction without love. Grace without truth is mercy without justice. Truth without grace is justice without mercy.
Grace without truth is soft and spoils people. Truth without grace is harsh and crushes people. Grace without truth is freedom without responsibility. Truth without grace is responsibility without freedom.
Either extremes are neither of Christ or the gospel. ~ Richard PW Tan

In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the average man should have a philosophy. For there are certain aspects of the relation between science and society that the scientist can appreciate better than anyone else, and if he does not insist on this significance no one else will, with the result that the relation of science to society will become warped, to the detriment of everybody. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

The scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

Finding our life's purpose is a journey not an event ~ Shelley J. Bridgman

Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

The result is that a generation of physicists is growing up who have never exercised any particular degree of individual initiative, who have had no opportunity to experience its satisfactions or its possibilities, and who regard cooperative work in large teams as the normal thing. It is a natural corollary for them to feel that the objectives of these large teams must be something of large social significance. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

It seems to me that there is a good deal of ballyhoo about scientific method. I venture to think that the people who talk most about it are the people who do least about it. Scientific method is what working scientists do, not what other people or even they themselves may say about it. No working scientist, when he plans an experiment in the laboratory, asks himself whether he is being properly scientific, nor is he interested in whatever method he may be using as method. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. "Rutherford wouldn't have me," Oppenheimer recalled. "He didn't think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar. ~ Kai Bird

It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

The operational approach demands that we make our reports and do our thinking in the freshest terms of which we are capable, in which we strip off the sophistications of millenia of culture and report as directly as we can on what happens. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

Indeed, it is very far from accurate to say that we see with our eyes. The eye is blind but for the idea behind the eye. ~ George B. Bridgman

I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the articles in the Encyclopaedia, is that it must be public. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

PW spent time with Sigel in a New York recording studio shortly before he went away on his federal gun possession charge. He paged through a book of promotional photos of himself, one of which was shot shortly after 911. It featured him holding a copy of the Bible upright in one palm while the Koran rose from the other the Twin Towers. Some of the record company people, they wouldn't let me put this out, ... They said it would be too controversial. But this picture is saying 'Look, they can stand together. Don't have to be no fight.' ~ Beanie Sigel

The process that I want to call scientific is a process that involves the continual apprehension of meaning, the constant appraisal of significance accompanied by a running act of checking to be sure that I am doing what I want to do, and of judging correctness or incorrectness. This checking and judging and accepting, that together constitute understanding, are done by me and can be done for me by no one else. They are as private as my toothache, and without them science is dead. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman