physical science

I accompanied the whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest practical advantage.

He described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could teach in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest.

He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty's most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek.

In the representations of the Comic poets, and in the opinion of the multitude, he had been identified with the teachers of physical science and with the Sophists.

Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of activity in physical science. These things became stereotyped as education, as the manner of men is.

But he offered me even better than that--offered to make me president of some great college of physical sciences that is being planned--the Oligarchy must get rid of its surplus somehow, you see.

Also, he was the translator of the famous book on "The Sensations of Tone," written by Helmholtz, who, in the period from 1871 to 1894 made Berlin the world-centre for the study of the physical sciences. So it happened that when Bell ran to Ellis as a young enthusiast and told his experiments, Ellis informed him that Helmholtz had done the same things several years before and done them more completely.

The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left--natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places--this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as one of lying in wait.

He also reveals, however, that the inductive self-confidence of the physical sciences was badly shaken by the development of relativity physics and quantum physics at the start of the 20th century.

Like most of the men of his day - who today would object to the limitations of the canon of scientific "meaning" - he founded his hope for language on the optimistic prospect that the natural and physical sciences would accurately map the relations of the physical universe.