Rutherford Famous Quotes

Early in the twentieth century, the physicist Lord Rutherford, best known for his landmark discovery of the atomic nucleus, famously pronounced, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.

He was a big, rather clumsy man, with a substantial bay window that started in the middle of the chest. I should guess that he was less muscular than at first sight he looked. He had large staring blue eyes and a damp and pendulous lower lip. He didn't look in the least like an intellectual. Creative people of his abundant kind never do, of course, but all the talk of Rutherford looking like a farmer was unperceptive nonsense. His was really the kind of face and physique that often goes with great weight of character and gifts. It could easily have been the soma of a great writer. As he talked to his companions in the streets, his voice was three times as loud as any of theirs, and his accent was bizarre…. It was part of his nature that, stupendous as his work was, he should consider it 10 per cent more so. It was also part of his nature that, quite without acting, he should behave constantly as though he were 10 per cent larger than life. Worldly success? He loved every minute of it: flattery, titles, the company of the high official world...But there was that mysterious diffidence behind it all. He hated the faintest suspicion of being patronized, even when he was a world figure. Archbishop Lang was once tactless enough to suggest that he supposed a famous scientist had no time for reading. Rutherford immediately felt that he was being regarded as an ignorant roughneck. He produced a formidable list of his last month’s reading. Then, half innocently, half malevolently: "And what do you manage to read, your Grice?" I am afraid", said the Archbishop, somewhat out of his depth, "that a man in my position doesn't really have the leisure..." Ah yes, your Grice," said Rutherford in triumph, "it must be a dog's life! It must be a dog's life!

Over in Europe, at around the same time, people were creating art in very similar ways. Southern France is littered with caves adorned with pictures of astonishing beauty and skill that date from around this time all the way into the near present. Lascaux, near Montignac, is probably the most famous, a Pleistocene art gallery from a much more recent 17,000 years ago, displaying more than 6,000 figures, interpretations of hunts, with horses and bison, felines, the extinct colossal elk Megaloceros giganteus, and abstract symbols whose meaning we can never understand. People painted in charcoal and haematite and dabbed them onto the walls as pigments in suspensions with animal fats and clay. They are breathtaking. To the west, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave has the oldest wall art in Europe, again with beasts in relief, from hunts, and hunters – cave lions, hyenas, bears and panthers, oh my! The oldest of these were painted 37,000 years ago, according to the most up-to-date studies in 2016.

the doctrine of sanctification without personal effort, by simply “yielding ourselves to God,” is precisely the doctrine of the antinomian fanatics of the seventeenth century (to whom I have referred already, described in Rutherford’s Spiritual Antichrist), and that the tendency of it is evil in the extreme. Again, it would be easy to show that the doctrine is utterly subversive of the whole teaching of such tried and approved books as Pilgrim’s Progress, and that if we accept such doctrine, we ought to put Bunyan’s old book in the fire! If Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress simply yielded himself to God and never fought, struggled, or wrestled, I have read the famous allegory in vain. But the plain truth is, that people will persist in confusing two things that differ – that is, justification and sanctification.

For the man on the street, science and math sound too and soulless. It is hard to appreciate their significance Most of us are just aware of Newton's apple trivia and Einstein's famous e mc2. Science, like philosophy, remains obscure and detached, playing role in our daily lives. There is a general perception that science is hard to grasp and has direct relevance to what we do. After all, how often do we discuss Dante or Descartes over dinner anyway? Some feel it to be too academic and leave it to the intellectuals or scientists to sort out while others feel that such topics are good only for academic debate. The great physicist, Rutherford, once quipped that, "i you can't explain a complex theory to a bartender, the theory not worth it" Well, it could be easier said than done (applications of tools

Descartes helped develop rationalism, the school of thought famously promoted by Spinoza, which was in opposition to Francis Bacon's empiricism.