Percy Williams Bridgman Quotes

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.

Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.

The first business of a man of science is to proclaim the truth as he finds it, and let the world adjust itself as best it can to the new knowledge.

It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

Coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory.

The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.

My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the articles in the Encyclopaedia, is that it must be public.

In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.