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Jean-Baptiste Biot
(21 Apr 1774 - 3 Feb 1862)
French physicist and mathematician.
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Science Quotes by Jean-Baptiste Biot (3 quotes)
It is to Borda and to Coulomb that one owes the renaissance of true physics in France, not a verbose and hypothetical physics, but that ingenious and exact physics which observes and compares all with rigor.
— Jean-Baptiste Biot
As quoted in C. Stewart Gillmor, Coulomb and the Evolution of Physics and Engineering in Eighteenth-Century France (2017), 230.
My son, all my life I have loved this science so deeply that I can now hear my heart beat for joy.
Commenting about Pasteur's accomplishment of separating two asymmetric forms of tartaric acid crystals.
Commenting about Pasteur's accomplishment of separating two asymmetric forms of tartaric acid crystals.
— Jean-Baptiste Biot
Quoted in Ralph Oesper, The Human Side of Scientists (1975), 152.
Then one day Lagrange took out of his pocket a paper which he read at the Académe, and which contained a demonstration of the famous Postulatum of Euclid, relative to the theory of parallels. This demonstration rested on an obvious paralogism, which appeared as such to everybody; and probably Lagrange also recognised it such during his lecture. For, when he had finished, he put the paper back in his pocket, and spoke no more of it. A moment of universal silence followed, and one passed immediately to other concerns.
— Jean-Baptiste Biot
Quoting Lagrange at a meeting of the class of mathematical and physical sciences at the Institut de France (3 Feb 1806) in Journal des Savants (1837), 84, trans. Ivor Grattan-Guinness.
See also:
- 21 Apr - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Biot's birth.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
