Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), one of the greatest scientists of all time, sometimes referred to as the "French Newton" or "Newton of France", with a natural phenomenal mathematical faculty possessed by none of his contemporaries, remarkably propounded the idea of black holes over 200 years ago.
However his notions of public office were not so profound. The great man's very short tenure as Minister of the Interior was terminated abruptly by Napoleon (1769-1821) with the following insightful practical assessment:
"Geometrician of the first rank, Laplace was not long in showing himself a worse than average administrator; since his first actions in office we recognized our mistake. Laplace did not consider any question objectively: he sought subtleties everywhere, only conceived problems, and finally carried the spirit of "hair-splitting" into the administration".
What Laplace said to Napoleon about God: "I have no need of that hypothesis."
ReplyDeleteAn intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
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