Hermann von Helmholtz Quotes

• Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility may rest assured that he seeks in vain.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

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• You all know how powerful and varied are the effects of which steam engines are capable; with them has really begun the great development of industry which has characterised our century before all others.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• Windmills, which are used in the great plains of Holland and North Germany to supply the want of falling water, afford another instance of the action of velocity. The sails are driven by air in motion – by wind.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• What appeared to the earlier physicists to be the constant quantity of heat is nothing more than the whole motive power of the motion of heat, which remains constant so long as it is not transformed into other forms of work, or results afresh from them.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• The older view of the nature of heat was that it is a substance, very fine and imponderable indeed, but indestructible, and unchangeable in quantity, which is an essential fundamental property of all matter.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• The law in question asserts, that the quantity of force which can be brought into action in the whole of Nature is unchangeable, and can neither be increased nor diminished.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• Reason we call that faculty innate in us of discovering laws and applying them with thought.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• Now, the external work of man is of the most varied kind as regards the force or ease, the form and rapidity, of the motions used on it, and the kind of work produced.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• Iron which is brought near a spiral of copper wire, traversed by an electrical current, becomes magnetic, and then attracts other pieces of iron, or a suitably placed steel magnet.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• I then endeavoured to show that it is more especially in the thorough conformity with law which natural phenomena and natural products exhibit, and in the comparative ease with which laws can be stated, that this difference exists.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• Heat can also be produced by the impact of imperfectly elastic bodies as well as by friction. This is the case, for instance, when we produce fire by striking flint against steel, or when an iron bar is worked for some time by powerful blows of the hammer.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• But heat can also be produced by the friction of liquids, in which there could be no question of changes in structure, or of the liberation of latent heat.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• A raised weight can produce work, but in doing so it must necessarily sink from its height, and, when it has fallen as deep as it can fall, its gravity remains as before, but it can no longer do work.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

• A moving body whose motion was not retarded by any resisting force would continue to move to all eternity.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

Hermann von Helmholtz (16)

Birth:	31st August, 1821
Death:	8th September, 1894
Nationality:	German
Profession:	Physicist, Physiologist

About

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was born in Potsdam, Germany. He was a German  Physiologist and physicist. The largest German association of research institutions, the Helmholtz Association, is named after him. In physics, he is known for his theories on the conservation of energy, work in electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, and on a mechanical foundation of thermodynamics. Helmholtz's first academic position was as a teacher of Anatomy at the Academy of Arts, Berlin in 1848. He served as associate professor of physiology at the Prussian University of Königsberg in 1849. He served as a professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Bonn in 1855. He served as a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, Baden. In 1871 he served as a professor of physics at the University of Berlin.

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