The waves of light are not anything mechanical or material, but are something electrical and magnetic-they are, in fact, electrical disturbances periodic in space and time, and travelling with a known and tremendous speed through the ether of space. Their very existence depends upon the ether, and their speed of propagation is its best known and most certain quantitative property.
Oliver LodgeRelated topics
anything best certain electrical ether existence fact known light material mechanical propagation property something space speed time travellingRelated quotes
I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.
Isaac Newton
.. the word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers.... one of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'....(abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.
Willem de Kooning
Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange” (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The immaterial Blue colour shown at Iris Clert's in April [1958, together with Jean Tinguely ] had in short made me inhuman, had excluded me from the world of tangible reality; I was an extreme element of society who lived in space and who had no means of coming back to earth. Jean Tinguely saw me in space and signaled to me in speed to show me the last machine to take to return to the ephemerality of material life.
Yves Klein
Orientation in time, space, and status are the essentials of social existence, and the Balinese, although they make very strong spirits for ceremonial occasions, with a few startling exceptions resist alcohol, because if one drinks one loses one's orientation. Orientation is felt as a protection rather than as a strait jacket and its loss provokes extreme anxiety.
Margaret Mead
