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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. He was the first person in Germany to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books" or "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the tree-l…
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science · German scientist and satirist (1742–1799) · physicist · astronomer · writer · mathematician · university teacher · French moralist · philosopher · also Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg
Born 1 July 1742 · Died 24 February 1799 · Q57554
11 published statements · 0 followers
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They had six children: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1786–1845), Louise Wilhelmina Lichtenberg (1789–1802), Agnes Lichtenberg (1793–1820), Augusta Friederike Lichtenberg (1795–1837), Heinrich August Lichtenberg (1797–1836) and Christian Wilhelm Lichtenberg (1799–1860).
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Died 1799-02-24.
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
“All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.”
“A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.”
“Barbarzyńska dokładność; skomląca pokora.”
“Variant translation: Everyone has a moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability.”
“Ist es nicht sonderbar, daß die Menschen so gern für die Religion fechten und so ungern nach ihren Vorschriften leben?. (niem.)”
“Dla wielu ludzi cnota polega raczej na żalu za grzechy niż na niepopełnianiu grzechów.”
“Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.”
“A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.”
Born 1742-07-01.
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