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" "All laws are... deduced from experiment; but to enunciate them, a special language is needful... ordinary language is too poor...
This... is one reason why the physicist can not do without mathematics; it furnishes him the only language he can speak. And a well-made language is no indifferent thing;
...the analyst, who pursues a purely esthetic aim, helps create, just by that, a language more fit to satisfy the physicist.
...law springs from experiment, but not immediately. Experiment is individual, the law deduced from it is general; experiment is only approximate, the law is precise...
In a word, to get the law from experiment, it is necessary to generalize... But how generalize? ...in this choice what shall guide us?
It can only be analogy. ...What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?
It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.
Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912), generally known as Henri Poincaré, was one of France's greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists, and a philosopher of science.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Le plus grand hasard est la naissance d’un grand homme. Ce n’est que par hasard que se sont rencontrées deux cellules génitales, de sexe différent, qui contenaient précisément, chacune de son côté, les éléments mystérieux dont la réaction mutuelle devait produire le génie. On tombera d’accord que ces éléments doivent être rares et que leur rencontre est encore plus rare. Qu’il aurait fallu peu de chose pour dévier de sa route le spermatozoïde qui les portait ; il aurait suffi de le dévier d’un dixième de millimètre et Napoléon ne naissait pas et les destinées d’un continent étaient changées. Nul exemple ne peut mieux faire comprendre les véritables caractères du hasard.
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