Gases are distinguished from other forms of matter, not only by their power of indefinite expansion so as to fill any vessel, however large, and by the great effect heat has in dilating them, but by the uniformity and simplicity of the laws which regulate these changes.
Interpretation
Gases have unique properties that allow them to expand and fill any space, influenced significantly by heat.
In this quote, James Clerk Maxwell emphasizes the distinct characteristics of gases that set them apart from other states of matter. He highlights their ability to expand indefinitely to occupy any space and the critical role that heat plays in this process, alongside the simplicity and uniformity of the laws governing these behaviors, which makes understanding gases fundamentally different from understanding solids and liquids.
In practice
In a physics lecture discussing the properties of gases.
Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
What's the go of that? What's the particular go of that?
I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.
If we betake ourselves to the statistical method, we do so confessing that we are unable to follow the details of each individual case, and expecting that the effects of widespread causes, though very different in each individual, will produce an average result on the whole nation, from a study of which we may estimate the character and propensities of an imaginary being called the Mean Man.
We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
By the way, were we to find life-forms on Venus, we would probably call them Venutians, just as people from Mars would be Martians. But according to rules of Latin genitives, to be “of Venus” ought to make you a Venereal. Unfortunately, medical doctors reached that word before astronomers did. Can’t blame them, I suppose. Venereal disease long predates astronomy, which itself stands as only the second oldest profession.
Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.