Karl Pearson: Quotes about laws

Karl Pearson was English mathematician and biometrician. Explore interesting quotes on law.

Karl Pearson: 130 quotes0 likes

“The single statement, the brief formula, the few words of which replace in our minds a wide range of relationships between isolated phenomena, is what we term a scientific law. Such a law, relieving our memory from the burden of individual sequences, enables us, with the minimum of intellectual fatigue, to grasp a vast complexity of natural or social phenomena. The discovery of law is... the peculiar function of the creative imagination. But this imagination has to be a disciplined one.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“To say that there are certain fields—for example, metaphysics—from which science is excluded, wherein its methods have no application, is merely to say that the rules of methodical observation and the laws of logical thought do not apply to the facts, if any, which lie within such fields. These fields, if indeed such exist, must lie outside any intelligible definition which can be given of the word knowledge.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“When... a simple principle has been discovered... then this principle or law itself generally leads to the discovery of a still wider range of hitherto unregarded phenomena... Every great advance of science opens our eyes to facts which we had failed before to observe, and makes new demands...”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Our conception of chance is one of law and order in large numbers; it is not that idea of chaotic incidence which vexed the mediaeval mind.”

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

“Monte Carlo roulette, if judged by returns which are published... is, if the laws of chance rule, from the standpoint of exact science the most prodigious miracle of the nineteenth century.”

"The Scientific Aspect of Monte Carlo Roulette" (1894)

“The absence of the improbable, the redundancy of the probable, is just as much conclusive evidence against conformity with scientific law as the too frequent occurrence of the improbable itself.”

"The Scientific Aspect of Monte Carlo Roulette" (1894)

“[T]he laws of science are products of the human mind rather than factors of the external world.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“[W]hen the law is reached... it must be tested and criticised by its discoverer in every conceivable way, till he is certain that the imagination has not played him false, and that his law is in real agreement with the whole group of phenomena...”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“[W]e are forced to accept... that the random spinning of a roulette manufactured and daily readjusted with extraordinary care is not obedient to the laws of chance, but is chaotic in its manifestations.”

"The Scientific Aspect of Monte Carlo Roulette" (1894)