Laplace Quotes & Sayings

Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Laplace considers astronomy a science of observation, because we can only observe the movements of the planets; we cannot reach them, indeed, to alter their course and to experiment with them. "On earth," said Laplace, "we make phenomena vary by experiments; in the sky, we carefully define all the phenomena presented to us by celestial motion." Certain physicians call medicine a science of observations, because they wrongly think that experimentation is inapplicable to it. — Claude Bernard

What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense. — Pierre Laplace

To Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God: Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Napoleon: You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe. Laplace: Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis. Later when told by Napoleon about the incident, Lagrange commented: Ah, but that is a fine hypothesis. It explains so many things. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,-disentangle them who may. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

...by shortening the labours doubled the life of the astronomer.

{On the benefit of John Napier's logarithms.} — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure. — Robert Andrews Millikan

The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

The influence of electricity in producing decompositions, although of inestimable value as an instrument of discovery in chemical inquiries, can hardly be said to have been applied to the practical purposes of life, until the same powerful genius [Davy] which detected the principle, applied it, by a singular felicity of reasoning, to arrest the corrosion of the copper-sheathing of vessels ... this was regarded as by Laplace as the greatest of Sir Humphry's discoveries. — Charles Babbage

Of Sir Isaac Newton's momentous decipherment of the laws of the universe, the French scientist Pierre-Simon de Laplace famously told Napoleon, in his philosophical euphoria, that he no longer had need of God to make sense of creation. Secular science could henceforth exile God from his universe. In Joseph Smith's conception, by contrast, naturalism and God co-exist. — Terryl L. Givens

Truth and justice are the immutable laws of social order. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

[Science] dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relations with nature, errors the more damaging in that the social order should rest only on those relations. TRUTH! JUSTICE! Those are the immutable laws. Let us banish the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to depart from them and to deceive or enslave mankind to assure its happiness. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

What we know is not much. What we don't know is enormous. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

The scientist who recognizes God knows only the God of Newton. To him the God imagined by Laplace and Comte is wholly inadequate. He feels that God is in nature, that the orderly ways in which nature works are themselves the manifestations of God's will and purpose. Its laws are his orderly way of working. — Arthur Compton

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

I often asked Laplace what he thought of God. He owned that he was an atheist. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Man follows only phantoms. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] ... Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals. — Clifford A. Truesdell

Probability theory is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. -1819 — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

"Read Euler: he is our master in everything." — Pierre-Simon Laplace

The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which of times they are unable to account. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

His last words, according to De Morgan: Man follows only phantoms. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all. All is. There is the part of nature that we perceive, and the part of nature that we do not perceive ... If you abandon these facts, beware; charlatans will light upon them, also the imbecile. There is no mean: science, or ignorance. If science does not want these facts, ignorance will take them up. You have refused to enlarge human intelligence, you augment human stupidity. When Laplace withdraws Cagliostro appears. — Victor Hugo

Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Give me the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, and I will predict the future. — Marquis Pierre Simon De Laplace

Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself — Henry Adams

A mathematician of the first rank, Laplace quickly revealed himself as only a mediocre administrator; from his first work we saw that we had been deceived. Laplace saw no question from its true point of view; he sought subtleties everywhere; had only doubtful ideas, and finally carried the spirit of the infinitely small into administration. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated ... The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyod the two greatest men of antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

We are so far from knowing all the forces of nature and their various modes of action that it would be unworthy of the philosopher to deny phenomena simply because they are inexplicable at the present state of our knowledge. The more difficult it is to acknowledge their existence, the greater the care with which we must study these phenomena. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

I have lived long enough to know what I did not at one time believe
that no society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow. — Neil Armstrong

It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Laplace's Demon, the hypothetical imp that knows the instantaneous positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, was said to be able to calculate the entire future or past by plugging these values into the equations that express the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism. — Steven Pinker

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words 'Thus it plainly appears', I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears. — Nathaniel Bowditch

The cosmos does not require God, Laplace said to himself. But Emperors require Him. All those who seek to subjugate human beings in one form or another require Him. Science does not need God. — Tomichan Matheikal

Do you believe in god? I have no need for that hypothesis, he may be around though. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. " ... The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes. — Kathryn Schulz

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic. We certainly cannot predict future events exactly if we cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!
We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being who, unlike us, could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals. It seems better to employ the principle of economy known as Occam's razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed. — Stephen Hawking

The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. Infinitely varied in its effects, nature is simple only in its causes, and its economy consists in producing a great number of phenomena, often very complicated, by means of a small number of general laws. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis. — Pierre Laplace