Pierre-Simon Laplace quotes

Pierre-Simon Laplace was a French mathematician, physicist, and astronomer who made significant contributions to the fields of statistics, celestial mechanics, and probability theory. His work helped lay the foundation for modern mathematical physics and our understanding of the solar system. He became renowned for formulating Laplace's equation and for his philosophical ideas about scientific determinism. Here are 26 of his quotes:

Man follows only phantoms.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Let us recall that formerly, and at no remote epoch... all the unusual phenomena were regarded as so many signs of celestial wrath.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

All these efforts in the search for truth tend to lead it.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

The theory of chance consists in reducing all the events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening bounds of knowledge and disappear entirely before sound philosophy, which sees in them only the expression of our ignorance of the true causes.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but probability problems.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

It is therefore obvious that...

Pierre-Simon Laplace

All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

The most important questions of life... are indeed for the most part only problems of probability.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Do you believe in god? I have no need for that hypothesis, he may be around though.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

I did not need to make such an assumption.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Truth and justice are the immutable laws of social order.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

I have lived long enough to know what I did not at one time believe--that no society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

The theory of chance consists in reducing all the events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible, that is to say, to such as we may be equally undecided about in regard to their existence, and in determining the number of cases favorable to the event whose probability is sought.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Laplace made many important discoveries in mathematical physics... Indeed, he was interested in anything that helped to interpret nature. He worked on hydrodynamics, the wave propagation of sound, and the tides. In the field of chemistry, his work on the liquid state of matter is classic. His studies of the tension in the surface layer of water, which accounts for the rise of liquids inside a capillary tube, and of the cohesive forces in liquids, are fundamental. Laplace and Lavoisier designed an ice calorimeter (1784) to measure heat and measured the specific heat of numerous substances; heat, to them, was still a special kind of matter. Most of Laplace's life was, however, devoted to celestial mechanics.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Laplace had taken Newton's science and turned it into philosophy. The universe was a piece of machinery, its history was predetermined, there was no room for chance or for free will. The cosmos was indeed an ice-cold clock.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

The exchange is reported by Victor Hugo (who in turn was citing François Arago) as:.

Pierre-Simon Laplace