The feeling of understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it any ostensibly scientific activity is as sterile as that of a high school student substituting numbers into a formula. For this reason, science, when I push the analysis back as far as I can, must be private.
Percy Williams BridgmanThe true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.
Percy Williams BridgmanI can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy.
Percy Williams BridgmanIn general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.
Percy Williams BridgmanBy far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.
Percy Williams Bridgman