Which is more remarkable fact about America: that millionaires are idealists or idealists become millionaires. - Ludwig Boltzmann

[W]e will be able to identify that quantity which is usually called entropy with the probability of the particular state.

The unknown electric action accompanying a chemical process augments these transverse vibrations enormously. The generalised coordinates of the ether, on which these vibrations depend, have not the same vis viva as the coordinates which determine the position of a molecule, because the entire ether has not had time to come into with the gas molecules, and has in no respect attained the state which it would have if it were enclosed for an infinitely long time in the same vessel with the molecules of the gas.

If this theory were to hold good for all phenomena, we should be still a long way off what Faust's famous famulus [Wagner] hoped to attain, viz., to know everything. But the difficulty of enumerating all the material points of the universe, and of determining the law of mutual force for each pair, would be only a quantitative one; nature would be a difficult problem, but not a mystery for the human mind.