Not who you're looking for? Others named William Thomson: Scottish politician in New Zealand · Scottish musicologist · English physician and geologist · Scots-Irish surgeon
“I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”
“I am afraid I am not in the flight for “aerial navigation”. I was greatly interested in your work with kites; but I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. So you will understand that I would not care to be a member of the aëronautical Society.”
“Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.”
“Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.”
“Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time.”
“Now I think hydrodynamics is to be the root of all physical science, and is at present second to none in the beauty of its mathematics.”
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.