Mechanics

“People get a lot of confusion, because they keep trying to think of quantum mechanics as classical mechanics.”

“To the art of mechanics is owing all sorts of instruments to work with, all engines of war, ships, bridges, mills, curious roofs and arches, stately theatres, columns, pendent galleries, and all other grand works in building. Also clocks, watches, jacks, chariots, carts and carriages, and even the wheel-barrow. Architecture, navigation, husbandry, and military affairs, owe their invention and use to this art.”

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

“Experimental physics was particularly interested in the processes taking place inside the atom, and in this field the classical mechanics was failing conspicuously and completely. Perhaps its most spectacular failure was with the fundamental problem with the structure of the atom.”

“Aristotle's failure in Biology is not less conspicuous than his failure in Mechanics; yet the ideas of Final Cause, Likeness, and Vitality, which are said to be the ideas appropriate to this science, were assuredly possessed by him with a distinctness unsurpassed in modern times.”

“Herschel has noticed how the Stagirite obstructed the progress of astronomy by not identifying celestial with terrestrial mechanics, but laying down the principle that celestial motions were regulated by peculiar laws, thus placing them entirely without the pale of experimental research, while at the same time the progress of mechanics was impeded by the [his] assumption of natural and unnatural motions.”

“In the beginning was mechanics.”

“All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.”

“The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.”

“I'm proud to publish this book under my own name, though I don't fully understand the mechanics of its production or the nature of the personality I assume in delivering it. I had no conscious work to do on the book at all. I simply went into trance twice a week, spoke in a "mediumistic" capacity for Seth, or as Seth, and dictated the words to my husband, Robert Butts, who wrote them down.”

“Not one word is said here of acausality, wave mechanics, indeterminacy relations, complementarity, … etc. Why doesn’t he talk about what he knows instead of trespassing on the professional philosopher’s preserves? Ne sutor supra crepidam. On this I can cheerfully justify myself: because I do not think that these things have as much connection as is currently supposed with a philosophical view of the world.”

“No force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.”

“It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.”