The makers of Encyclopædia Britannica bring you one of the Great Books of the Western World. This text captures major ideas, stories, and discoveries that helped shape Western culture.
“It also emphasized that in the determination of empirical phenomena the instruments of observation have to be taken into account as an essential factor. In this sense what we see is also a matter of what we see it with.” (Page 300)
“A mathematician, on the other hand, has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.” (Page 368)
“We do not believe our eyes unless we are first convinced that what they appear to tell us is credible” (Page 260)
“Ultimately, every observation can, of course, be reduced to our sense perceptions” (Page 315)