Pierre-Simon Laplace
Newton of France, transformed probability and celestial mechanics
Quotes by Pierre-Simon Laplace
The universe is a grand book, which cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics.
The human mind is a machine for drawing conclusions from premises.
The greatest advantage of mathematics is that it allows us to reason about things that we cannot see or touch.
The more we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.
The true scientist is a perpetual student.
The laws of probability are the laws of common sense.
The future is uncertain, but the past is fixed.
The universe is a clockwork mechanism, and we are merely cogs in the machine.
The only thing that is constant is change.
The human mind is a slave to its passions.
The greatest discoveries are often the simplest.
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
The most important questions of life are, for the most part, nothing but problems of probability.
It is an excellent thing to know the order of the universe and to be able to predict the phenomena which it presents to us.
We are so far from knowing all the forces of nature and the different ways in which they act, that it would be unphilosophical to deny phenomena solely because they are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge.
The more profound our knowledge of the laws of nature, the more we are convinced that everything is determined by them.
The human mind has been able to understand the laws of the universe, and to predict the phenomena which it presents to us.
The universe is a vast machine, the movements of which are determined by immutable laws.
It is difficult to give a satisfactory definition of probability.
The most important applications of the theory of probabilities are to the sciences of observation, and especially to astronomy.