Quotes about experimentation (384 quotes)

“I can respect the artistic aim of a composer if he arrives at the so-called modern idiom after an intense period of preparation…Such composers know what they are doing when they break a law; they know what to react against, because they have had experience in the classical forms and style. Having mastered the rules, they know which can be violated and which should be obeyed. But, I am sorry to say, I have found too often that young composers plunge into the writing of experimental music with their school lessons only half learned. Too much radical music is sheer sham, for this very reason: its composer sets about revolutionizing the laws of music before he learned them himself.”

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) Russian composer, pianist, and conductor

Interviewed by David Ewen in The Etude, 1941; cited from Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern Universities Press, 1997) pp. 235-6

School , Law , Music , Learning

“I often liken the process of physics research to solving a jigsaw puzzle. As we put together pieces to form patches, a certain image of the overall picture emerges, but until the game is sufficiently progressed, we are not quite sure. I feel much the same way about the wealth of signs for new particles. We have patches that have been put together, but we are not quite sure how all pieces will fit together into a coherent whole. There are also certain pieces which do not seem to fit into any patches at all. For the most part, the experimental findings have not been completely unexpected, but there have been certain surprises that I, for one, had not foreseen. This is what makes particle physics exciting and tantalizing. At moments of despair and frustration, I feel as though somebody has scrambled two boxes of jigsaw puzzles for me to put together.”

Benjamin W. Lee (1935–1977) Korean American physicist

about his work as a particle physicist, at the Fermilab History and Archives Project: Benjamin Lee comments on HEP discoveries http://history.fnal.gov/significant_staff.html#Benjamin_Lee (May, 1976).

Way , Feeling , Game , Parting

“I had a bad PCP [angel dust] experience when I was 14 and I got panic disorder. And of course, I wasn’t telling anyone the truth. It’s not like you go to your dad or your doctor and say, “Yeah, I smoked PCP and I’m having a bad time.” So I became more or less agoraphobic because I’d have flashbacks. From 14 to 16, I didn’t have any friends. I stayed home most of the time. Up till then life was pretty great. The world was big and I felt I could do anything I wanted. Suddenly, I felt like I couldn’t do anything. But in the isolation, my imagination really had time to run. I never did any drugs until my late 20s. Unfortunately, being a child of two alcoholics, I started drinking a lot, and that’s what eventually got me back into drugs. You often hear that pot leads to harder drugs. But I think alcohol is what leads you to everything, because it takes away the fear. The worst drug experimentation I ever did was because I was drunk and didn’t care.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Talking about drugs, quoted in **
Audioslave Era

Life , Alcohol , Truth , World

“To prepare teachers in the method of the experimental sciences is not an easy matter.”

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) Italian pedagogue, philosopher and physician

Source: The Montessori Method (1912), Ch. 1 : A Critical Consideration of the New Pedagogy in its Relation to Modern Science, p. 7.
Context: To prepare teachers in the method of the experimental sciences is not an easy matter. When we shall have instructed them in anthropometry and psychometry in the most minute manner possible, we shall have only created machines, whose usefulness will be most doubtful. Indeed, if it is after this fashion that we are to initiate our teachers into experiment, we shall remain forever in the field of theory. The teachers of the old school, prepared according to the principles of metaphysical philosophy, understood the ideas of certain men regarded as authorities, and moved the muscles of speech in talking of them, and the muscles of the eye in reading their theories. Our scientific teachers, instead, are familiar with certain instruments and know how to move the muscles of the hand and arm in order to use these instruments; besides this, they have an intellectual preparation which consists of a series of typical tests, which they have, in a barren and mechanical way, learned how to apply.
The difference is not substantial, for profound differences cannot exist in exterior technique alone, but lie rather within the inner man. Not with all our initiation into scientific experiment have we prepared new masters, for, after all, we have left them standing without the door of real experimental science; we have not admitted them to the noblest and most profound phase of such study, — to that experience which makes real scientists.

Teachers , Science

“I come forward as the supporter of that great interest which is the only solid basis of the social fabric, and, convinced that the sound prosperity of this country depends upon the protected industry of the farmer, I would resist that spirit of rash and experimental legislation which is fast hurrying this once glorious Empire to the agony of civil convulsion.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Address to the electors of Buckinghamshire (12 December 1832), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 225

Support , Dependency , Country

“After the failure of his first experimental explorations around Vicksburg, a committee of abolition war managers waited upon the President and demanded the General’s removal, on the false charge that he was a whiskey drinker, and little better than a common drunkard. “Ah!” exclaimed Honest Old Abe, “you surprise me, gentlemen. But can you tell me where he gets his whiskey?” “We cannot, Mr. President. But why do you desire to know?” “Because, if I can only find out, I will send a barrel of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army.””

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Statement first attributed in the New York Herald, (September 18, 1863) in response to allegations his most successful general drank too much; as quoted in Wit and Wisdom of the American Presidents: A Book of Quotations (2000) by Joslyn T. Pine, p. 26.
When some one charged Gen. Grant, in the President’s hearing, with drinking too much liquor, Mr. Lincoln, recalling Gen. Grant’s successes, said that if he could find out what brand of whisky Grant drank, he would send a barrel of it to all the other commanders.
The New York Times, October 30, 1863
Major Eckert asked Mr. Lincoln if the story of his interview with the complainant against General Grant was true. The story was: a growler called on the President and complained bitterly of General Grant’s drunkenness. The President inquired very solicitously, if the man could tell him where the General got his liquor. The man really was very sorry but couldn’t say where he did get it. The President replied that he would like very much to find out so he could get a quantity of it and send a barrel to all his Major Generals. Mr. Lincoln said he had heard the story before and it would be very good if he had said it, but he did not, and he supposed it was charged to him to give it currency. He then said the original of this story was in King George’s time. Bitter complaints were made to the King against his General Wolfe in which it was charged that he was mad. “Well,” said the King, “I wish he would bite some of my other Generals then.
Authenticity of quote first refuted in “The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States” by William R. Plum, (1882).
Disputed

War , Failure , Waiting , Falseness

“Pragmatism, in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 50.

Life , Science

“It concerns the opinion of Naudin and Darwin that a single pollen grain does not suffice for fertilization of the ovule. I used Mirabilis Jalappa for an experimental plant, as Naudin had done; the result of my experiment is, however, completely different. From fertilizations with single pollen grains, I obtained eighteen well-developed seeds, and from these an equal number of plants, of which ten are already in bloom”

Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) Silesian scientist and Augustinian friar

Letter VIII, July 3rd, 1870.
Letters to Carl Nägeli

“The experimenter dealing with nature faces an outside and often hard world. Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

in his Nobel Autobiography, edited by [Gösta Ekspong, Nobel Lectures in Physics 1991-1995, World Scientific, 1997, 9810226780, 161]

World , Nature , Change

“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) German mathematician and physicist

Address to the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, (Sep 21, 1908)

Reality , Time

“No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astonishingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material…. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity.”

Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) German philosopher

End of Chapter 1
An Essay on Man (1944)

Age , History , Nature , Knowledge

“There is an ancient Chinese saying "He who labours with his mind rules over he who labours with his hand". This kind of backward idea is very harmful to youngsters from developing countries. Partly because of this type of concept, many students from these countries are inclined towards theoretical studies and avoid experimental work.

In reality, a theory in natural science cannot be without experimental foundations; physics, in particular, comes from experimental work.”

Samuel C. C. Ting (1936) physicist

Nobel banquet speech http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1976/ting-speech.html, December 10, 1976

Idea , Nature , Reality , Study

“It is always a good plan for a speculative experimenter to have two experiments going, or at least one going and one being built.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Nobel Lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1995/perl-lecture.html, Martin L. Perl, The Nobel Prize in Physics 1995
Nobel prize lecture

“Considering the pervasive importance of quantum mechanics in modern physics, it is odd how rarely one hears of efforts to test quantum mechanics experimentally with high precision.…The trouble is that it is very difficult to find any logically consistent generalization of quantum mechanics. One obvious target for generalization is the linearity of quantum mechanics, but if we arbitrarily add nonlinear terms to the Schrodinger equation, how do we know that the theory we obtain will have a sensible physical interpretation? At least in part, it is the dearth of generalized versions of quantum mechanics that has made it so hard to plan experimental tests of quantum mechanics.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

"Testing Quantum Mechanics" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003491689902765, Annals of Physics (1989)

Effort , Parting

“When we started, there were KRAFTWERK and TANGERINE DREAM, and both bands also became very very strong internationally but in a different area, in a different field. They were doing, like, experimental kind of music, and KRAFTWERK were amazing, while we played just traditional rock.”

Klaus Meine (1948) German singer

Dreams , Music , Strong

“The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

The Fabric of Reality (1997)

“A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

"Particle physics, from Rutherford to the LHC," Physics Today 64, no.8 (August 2011), 29-33, on 30.

“Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides—that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist—but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development.”

Edwin Grant Conklin (1863–1952) American biologist and zoologist

Edwin Grant Conklin, " The Mechanism of Heredity https://archive.org/details/jstor-1633782,", Science, Vol 27, nr 691, January 17, 1908

Problem , Study

“This [experimentation] is the custom—and properly so—in those sciences where mathematical demonstrations are applied to natural phenomena, as is seen in the case of perspective, astronomy, mechanics, music, and others where the principles, once established by well-chosen experiments, become the foundations of the entire superstructure.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Salviati, Third Day. Change of Position
Dialogues and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences (1638)

Music , Mathematics , Nature , Science

“When the great truth accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment; when the first plant is inaugurated and it is shown that a telegraphic message, almost as secret and non-interferable as a thought, can be transmitted to any terrestrial distance, the sound of the human voice, with all its intonations and inflections, faithfully and instantly reproduced at any other point of the globe, the energy of a waterfall made available for supplying light, heat or motive power, anywhere — on sea, or land, or high in the air — humanity will be like an ant heap stirred up with a stick: See the excitement coming!”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

"The Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires" in Electrical World and Engineer (5 March 1904)

Truth , Secret , Imagination , Motivation

“(Coining phrase "null hypothesis") In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the “null hypothesis,” and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.”

Ronald Fisher book The Design of Experiments

The Design of Experiments, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1935, p. 18
1930s

Chance

“Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Nobel prize lecture

Art , Science , Parting

“I am still going through an experimental stage. I'm not happy, and I keep scrubbing out and scrubbing out again. I hope this mania will pass... I'm like the children at school; the clean page has to be filled with good writing, and splash – a mess! I'm still making messes and I'm forty years old.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 169 : quote from Renoir's letter to his art-seller Durand-Ruel, 21st November 1881

Children , School , Hope , Happiness

“However far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is that simply by the word "experiment" we refer to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

Niels Bohr, "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics," in Paul Arthur Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher Scientist (1949) pp. 199-241.

Learning

“If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

"Handicapped People and Science" http://books.google.com/books?id=9LVFAAAAYAAJ&q=%22handicapped+people+and+science%22#search_anchor by Stephen Hawking, Science Digest 92, No. 9 (September 1984): 92 (details of citation from here http://www.enotes.com/stephen-hawking-criticism/hawking-stephen/further-reading).

Children , People , World , Way

“Loyalty… is a realization that America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.”

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Source: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), p. 154

Loyalty

“You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

[‘A real free press for the first time in history’: Wikileaks editor speaks out in London, Journalism.co.uk, 2007-08-12, 2010-08-01, http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2010/07/12/a-real-free-press-for-the-first-time-in-history-wikileaks-editor-speaks-out-in-london/]

“Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Saturday 21 April, 1929
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Truth , Feeling

“This grasping of the whole is obviously the aim of science as well, but it is a goal that necessarily lies very far off because science, whenever possible, proceeds experimentally and in all cases statistically. Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as practible. For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the question which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer. The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded. If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leave Nature to answer out of her fullness.”

C.G. Jung book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Source: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), p. 35

Way , Question , Nature , Science

“You should look at all the experimental information at hand, not only the most relevant, and be prepared to make conjectures if that helps.”

Hans Bethe (1906–2005) German-American nuclear physicist

as quoted by Edwin E. Salpeter in My Sixty Years with Hans Bethe, in an edition by [Gerald Edward Brown, Chang-Hwan Lee, Hans Bethe and his physics, World Scientific, 2006, 9812566090, 119–120]

Help

“If philosophy of religion is to become scientific, it must become empirical and found itself on religious experience. The Hindu philosophy of religion starts from and returns to an experimental basis. Hindu thinker readily admits of other points of view than his own and considers them to be just as worthy of attention.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Religion

“The metals are all essentially identical; they differ only in form. Now, the form brings out accidental causes, which the experimenter must try to discover and remove, as far as possible. Accidental causes impede the regular union of sulphur and mercury; for every metal is a combination of sulphur and mercury. A diseased womb may give birth to a weakly, leprous child, although the seed was good; the same is true of the metals which are generated in the bowels of the earth, which is a womb for them; any cause whatever, or local trouble, may produce an imperfect metal. When pure sulphur comes in contact with pure mercury, after more or less time, and by the permanent action of nature, gold is produced.”

Albertus Magnus (1206–1280) Dominican friar

As quoted by Francis Preston Venable, A Short History of Chemistry (1894) p. 28. https://books.google.com/books?id=fN9YAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA28

Disease , Birth , Nature , Time

“The experimental researches of Faraday are so voluminous, their descriptions are so detailed, and their wealth of illustration is so great, as to render it a heavy labour to master them.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

Preface to the Second Edition (December 1869).
Faraday as a Discoverer (1868)
Context: The experimental researches of Faraday are so voluminous, their descriptions are so detailed, and their wealth of illustration is so great, as to render it a heavy labour to master them. The multiplication of proofs, necessary and interesting when the new truths had to be established, are however less needful now when these truths have become household words in science.

Wealth

“The idea of a God we infer from our experimental dependence on something superior to ourselves in wisdom, power and goodness, which we call God; our senses discover to us the works of God which we call nature, and which is a manifest demonstration of his invisible essence.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. V Section II - Containing Observations on the Providence and Agency of God, as it Respects the Natural and Moral World, with Strictures on Revelation in General
Context: The idea of a God we infer from our experimental dependence on something superior to ourselves in wisdom, power and goodness, which we call God; our senses discover to us the works of God which we call nature, and which is a manifest demonstration of his invisible essence. Thus it is from the works of nature that we deduce the knowledge of a God, and not because we have, or can have any immediate knowledge of, or revelation from him.

Wisdom , God , Idea , Nature

“Taking experimental results and observations for granted and putting the burden of proof on the theory means taking the observational ideology for granted without having ever examined it.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

Pg. 67.
Against Method (1975)

“History is the record of a vast experimental investigation—of a search by man after the best conditions of existence.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

New Fragments (1892), p.33

History , Search

“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

No. 15
On the Interpretation of Nature (1753)
Context: There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

Nature , Knowledge

“California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

interview in Playboy magazine (February 1985 http://www.playboy.co.uk/article/16311/playboy-interview-steven-jobs) 
1980s
Context: Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan's poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities.

Sense

“Experimenters are the shocktroops of science… An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. But before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned – the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted – Nature’s answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of theorists, who find himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949)

Dependency , Question , Nature , Mathematics

“He has made contributions to many areas of science; among them are agronomy, anthropology, astronomy, bacteriology, botany, economics, forestry, meteorology, psychology, public health, and-above all-genetics, in which he is recognized as one of the leaders. Out of this varied scientific research and his skill in mathematics, he has evolved systematic principles for the interpretation of empirical data; and he has founded a science of experimental design. On the foundations he has laid down, there has been erected a structure of statistical techniques that are used whenever people attempt to learn about nature from experiment and observation.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

W. Allen Wallis (1952) at the University of Chicago while honoring Fisher with the Honorary degree of Doctor of Science; cited in: George E. P. Box (1976) " Science and Statistics http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writings/Boxonmaths.pdf" Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 71, No. 356. (Dec., 1976), pp. 791-799.

People , Learning , Health , Nature

“To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. … Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

Source: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch. 1

World , Science

“I consider self experimentation an architect’s obligation and duty.”

Jiri Lev (1979)

Source: Testing Ground for Sustainable Design https://www.dwell.com/article/tasmanian-house-jiri-lev-architect-cafe0e3d.

“I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Faith

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.”

Anthony Bourdain book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Source: Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Question

“All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.”

Simon Singh (1964) British author

Source: Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe

“I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Faith , Thinking

“Eric moved the broom experimentally and made an attempt to sweep the glass into the pan while it lay in the middle of the floor. Of course, the pan slid away. Eric scowled.
I'd finally found something Eric did poorly.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead as a Doornail

Source: Dead as a Doornail

“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

Source: Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

Way , Confidence , Failure , Cooking

“Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.”

John Ashbery (1927–2017) poet from the United States

Religion , Beauty , Art , Way

“The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Mathematics , Problem

“Youth is wholly experimental.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Letter to a Young Gentleman http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/stevenson/robert_louis/s848ce/s848ce22.html Scribner's Magazine (September 1888).

Youth

“The first question we should face is: What is the aim of a physical theory? To this question diverse answers have been made, but all of them may be reduced to two main principles:
"A physical theory," certain logicians have replied, "has for its object the explanation of a group of laws experimentally established."
"A physical theory," other thinkers have said, "is an abstract system whose aim is to summarize and classify logically a group of experimental laws without claiming to explain these laws…
Now these two questions — Does there exist a material reality distinct from sensible appearances? and What is the nature of reality? — do not have their source in experimental method, which is acquainted only with sensible appearances and can discover nothing beyond them. The resolution of these questions transcends the methods used by physics; it is the object of metaphysics.
Therefore, if the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics…
Now, to make physical theories depend on metaphysics is surely not the way to let them enjoy the privilege of universal consent.”

Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) French physicist, historian of science

Notice sur les Titres et Travaux scientifiques de Pierre Duhem rédigée par lui-même lors de sa candidature à l'Académie des sciences (mai 1913), The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906)

Law , Way , Question , Nature

“Only an unashamed dogmatist would dare to assert that the issue has finally been resolved now, in favor of the view that, outside logic or mathematics, the method of modern science is the only method to employ in seeking knowledge. The dogmatist who made this assertion would have to be more than ashamed. He would have to blind himself to the fact that his own assertion was not established by the experimental method, nor made as an indisputable conclusion of mathematical reasoning or of purely logical analysis.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Mathematics , Knowledge , Science

“Consider some of the qualities of typical modernistic poetry: very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion — violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization — these are justified, generally, as the disorganization required to express a disorganized age, or, alternatively, as newly discovered and more complex types of organization; an extremely personal style — refine your singularities; lack of restraint — all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public — he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive — the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational style of dramatic monologue; and so on and so on. This complex of qualities is essentially romantic; and the poetry that exhibits it represents the culminating point of romanticism.”

Randall Jarrell book Five Young American Poets

"A Note on Poetry," preface to The Rage for the Lost Penny: Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940) [p. 49]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Age , Dreams , Sense , Parting

“Because we cannot yet (1) characterize all the possible experimental designs along quantitative scales and (2) generate cost-of-error functions, comparisons must be made in specific contexts rather than by use of analytic optimizing.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 340 as cited in: Philosophica gandensia, Vol.6-7 (1968). p. 141.

Error , Optimism

“Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: The unity of science, 1934/1995, p. 42

Science

“Father-dominated people who form father-dominated cultures have father-religions: a male deity, an authoritative scripture, a strong central government, an intolerance for inquiry and research, a repressive sexual attitude, a deep conservatism (for one does not change what Father built), a rigid demarcation, in dress and conduct, between the sexes, and a profound horror of homosexuality.
Mother-dominated people who form mother-dominated cultures have mother religions: a female deity served by priestesses, a liberal government—one which feeds the masses and succors the helpless—a great tolerance for experimental thought, a permissive attitude toward sex, a hazy boundary between the insignes of the sexes, and a dread of incest.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 43 (pp. 131-132)
Venus Plus X (1960)

People , Religion , Sex , Strong

“It was a great achievement of the early chemists — with the crude experimental techniques available also with the ever-astonishing power of human reason (as potent then as now) — to discover this reduction of the world to its components, the chemical elements. Such reduction does not destroy its charm but adds understanding to sensation, and this understanding only deepens our delight.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Source: Periodic Kingdom (1995), p. 147-148

World , Understanding

“We shall see that the mathematical treatment of the subject [of electricity] has been greatly developed by writers who express themselves in terms of the 'Two Fluids' theory. Their results, however, have been deduced entirely from data which can be proved by experiment, and which must therefore be true, whether we adopt the theory of two fluids or not. The experimental verification of the mathematical results therefore is no evidence for or against the peculiar doctrines of this theory.”

James Clerk Maxwell book A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism

A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), §36.

Mathematics

“We now come to the underpinning contention of the previous monograph. Psychological phenomena, especially those involved in learning and education, stem from or are related to states of consciousness. Using the argument which relates the information available about conscious processes to the type of experimental situation, we maintain that the basic unit of psychological /educational observation is a conversation. In order to test hypotheses and explicate the conversational transactions, it is necessary to invoke various tools and explanatory constructs. These are coherent enough to count when interlocked as a theory, and this theory was dubbed conversation theory.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: Conversation Theory (1976), p. 3.

Education , Learning

“Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.”

David Brin book Earth

Part IX (p. 531)
Earth (1990)

Knowledge , Freedom

“[W]hen a body has experienced any changes, and when after a certain number of transformations it returns to precisely its original state, that is, to that state considered in respect to density, to temperature, to mode of aggregation—let us suppose, I say, that this body is found to contain the same quantity of heat that it contained at first, or else that the quantities of heat absorbed or set free in these different transformations are exactly compensated. This fact has never been called in question. It was first admitted without reflection, and verified afterwards in many cases by experiments with the calorimeter. To deny it would be to overthrow the whole theory of heat to which it serves as a basis. For the rest, we may say in passing, the main principles on which the theory of heat rests require the most careful examination. Many experimental facts appear almost inexplicable in the present state of this theory.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

Question , Appearance , Change

“Being an athlete, you have to consider whether your meals have enough of everything you need. As a vegetarian, you are forced to be creative, which I find makes me more adventurous with my cooking. Following a strict diet based on performance can be tedious, but because I enjoy the variety of my diet, it makes it easier to follow. … If any cyclists are thinking of becoming vegetarian, then I would suggest giving it a go. There’s definitely no harm in trying it! Be prepared to be experimental and open to new foods – you can’t just take out meat from your existing meals, you need to learn new ways of eating.”

Lizzie Deignan (1988) English track and road racing cyclist

"The Fuelling of a Champion: Lizzie Deignan" https://www.cycleplan.co.uk/blog/the-fuelling-of-a-champion-nutrition-of-pro-cyclist-lizzie-deignan, interview with The Cycleplan Blog (9 March 2018).

Food , Way , Thinking , Learning

“in our society at all levels not only uneducated but educated as well are dominated by superstitions of various kinds. The superstitions of the educated are only more sophisticated than those of the uneducated. So one needs to introduce real knowledge in place of superstitious beliefs. You need to explain to people believing in superstitious ideas that the ideas are not correct and this can be verified experimentally. When doing science popularization you have to express some facts of the real universe or the real world to the person who is not willing to believe in it and if you express it in a very pedantic way or say to the person that you are a fool, you should not believe this then it is not good because then he will believe in his superstitions even more. So you have to persuade him to think for himself, you don’t tell him what to believe but you ask him to try this experiment and see what is the reality. So that way you may be able to convince the person.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

People , World , Education , Fools

“The strategic act by which Grosseteste and his thirteenth- and fourteenth-century successors created modern experimental science was to unite the experimental habit of the practical arts with the rationalism of twelfth-century philosophy.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996) Australian zoologist, historian of science

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

Art , Science

“I was attracted to video art because it allowed me to combine a strong sense of content with formal innovation. The field was wide open and allowed for a great deal of experimentation for creating new forms.”

Beryl Korot (1945) American artist

Source: Meeker, Carlene. " Beryl Korot http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/korot-beryl." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on July 9, 2015)

Art , Sense , Strong

“Gravitational force is simple, and a thing by itself, as also are electric and magnetic forces as long as the electric and magnetic poles stand at rest. But as soon as motion comes into the picture, the whole situation is changed. Forces of new kinds come into play, for moving electric charges exert magnetic forces in addition to the electric forces they exert when at rest, while moving magnets exert electric forces in addition to the magnetic forces they exert while at rest. When the exact laws governing these intricate laws had been discovered by a great number of experimenters, Clerk Maxwell succeeded in expressing them in a mathematical form which was both simple and elegant.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Law , Mathematics , Change

“The fundamental thesis of ordinary conventionalism, represented for instance by Poincare, states that there are problems which cannot be solved by appeal to experience unless one introduces a certain convention, since only such a convention, together with experimental data, makes it possible to solve the problem in question. The judgements which combine to make up such a solution are thus not forced on us by empirical data alone, but their adoption depends partly on our recognition, since the said convention which co-determines the solution of the problem can be arbitrarily changed by us so that as a result we obtain different judgements.
In the present paper it is my intention to make that thesis of ordinary conventionalism more general and more radical. Namely, we want to formulate and to prove the theorem that not only some, but all the judgements which we accept and which combine to make up our image of the world are not univocally determined by empirical data, but depend on the choice of the conceptual apparatus by means of which we make mappings of those empirical data. We can, however, choose this or that conceptual apparatus, which will change our whole image of the world.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, "Das Weltbild und die Begriffsapparatur", in Erkenntnis, 1934, Vol. 4, p. 259; as cited in: Schaff (1962;81-82)

World , Question , Problem , Change

“Submission to the experimental data is the golden rule that dominates any scientific discipline.”

Maurice Allais (1911–2010) French economist; 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

La soumission aux données de l'expérience est la règle d'or qui domine toute discipline scientifique.
in his speech when he was awarded the Academician sword, address to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (October 19, 1993).

“Open platforms and experimental amateurs … eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros. … Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

"Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)" on BoingBoing (2 April 2010) http://boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-yo.html

“Labour, upon whichever of those operations it be bestowed, is productive, because it concurs in the creation of a product. Thus the labour of the philosopher, whether experimental or literary, is productive; the labour of the adventurer or master-manufacturer is productive, although he perform no actual manual work; the labour of every operative workman is productive, from the common day-labourer in agriculture, to the pilot that governs the motion of a ship.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter VII, p. 85

“I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Replying to Listeners" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/replylisteners.html, broadcast on KPFA (January 1963).

Age , Art , Thinking , Country

“Although previously the monoamine systems were considered to be responsible for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), the available evidence to date does not support a direct causal relationship with MDD. There is no simple direct correlation of serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain and mood. In other words, after a half-century of research, the chemical-imbalance hypothesis as promulgated by the drug companies that manufacture SSRIs and other antidepressants is not only without clear and consistent support, but has been disproved by experimental evidence.”

Irving Kirsch book The Emperor's New Drugs

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. p. 92 http://books.google.com/books?id=wk-OxcTKyi4C&pg=PA92

Mood , Support

“Grosseteste appears to have been the first medieval writer to recognize and deal with the two fundamental methodological problems of induction and experimental verification and falsification which arose when the Greek conception of geometrical demonstration was applied to the world of experience. He appears to have been the first to set out a systematic and coherent theory of experimental investigation and rational explanation by which the Greek geometrical method was turned into modern experimental science. As far as is known, he and his successors were the first to use and exemplify such a theory in the details of original research into concrete problems.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996) Australian zoologist, historian of science

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

World , Problem , Appearance , Science

“Around 1958, I became aware of H. A. Simon's seminal papers on bounded rationality and was immediately convinced by his arguments. I tried to construct a theory of boundedly rational multigoal decision making. Together with Heinz Sauermann, I worked out an "aspiration adaptation theory of the firm" which was published as a journal article in 1962… More and more I came to the conclusion that purely speculative approaches like that of our paper of 1962 are of limited value. The structure of boundedly rational economic behavior cannot be invented in the armchair, it must be explored experimentally.”

Reinhard Selten (1930–2016) German economist

"Reinhard Selten - Biographical," 1994

Behavior , Decision

“The security services are alarmed. Every nation that does research into fundamental physics — what we call experimental theology — is turning to its scientists urgently to discover what's going on. Because they know that something is happening. And they suspect it has to do with other worlds.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Sir Charles to Mrs. Coulter in Ch. 9 : Theft
His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997)

World

“I came back sophomore year and decided to do some shows because I did one small play senior year of high school and I had a lot of fun. I had one line, I think. I did an audition for a show; it was experimental theater and we had a great time. For my second show, I had a great role and a great time and my aunt came to see the show. I’m doing shows just to meet folks at this point, so that I could figure out what I want to do. When she saw the show, she said, “You know what? You may want to think about this as a career! You’re really good!””

Courtney B. Vance (1960) American actor

Alumni Spotlight: Courtney B. Vance http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/10/18/alumni-spotlight-courtney-vance/, The Harvard Crimson (October 18, 2016)

School , Thinking , Time

“There has been the conflict between science and religion. Science was the interpretation from the past that is considered today as hermeneutics, but the conflict concerns the experimental science. If we ask the scientists what is the science, they will not have a correct answer. Because they are so concerned with this issue that they can also be far from it. It is said that "human knows more than what he says". This indicates the existence of the implicit knowledge in the humans. The essence of science is ambiguous.”

Khosrow Bagheri (1957) Iranian philosopher of education

Religion , Knowledge , Science , Past

“Classical science in its diverse disciplines, be it chemistry, biology, psychology or the social sciences, tried to isolate the elements of the observed universe - chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, what not -- expecting that, by putting them together again, conceptually or experimentally, the whole or system - cell, mind, society - would result and be intelligible. Now we have learned that for an understanding not only the elements but their interrelations as well are required: say, the interplay of enzymes in a cell, of many mental processes conscious and unconscious, the structure and dynamics of social systems and the like.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), p. xix

Intelligence , Understanding , Learning , Universe

“Because of experimental science we know a very large number of things about the natural world of which our predecessors were ignorant. In the great books we can observe the birth of science, applaud the development of the experimental technique, and celebrate the triumphs it has won. But we can also note the limitations of the method and mourn the errors that its misapplication has caused. We can distinguish the outlines of those great persistent problems that the method … may never solve and find the clues to their solutions offered by other methods and other disciplines.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books , World , Error , Birth

“I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/160/mode/1up pp. 160-161

Nature , Appearance , Science

“Everyone is sure of this [that errors are normally distributed], Mr. Lippman told me one day, since the experimentalists believe that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians that it is an experimentally determined fact.”

Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) French mathematician, physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science

Tout le monde y croit cependant, me disait un jour M. Lippmann, car les expérimentateurs s'imaginent que c'est un théorème de mathématiques, et les mathématiciens que c'est un fait expérimental.
Calcul des probabilités (2nd ed., 1912), p. 171

Error , Mathematics

“In recent years, the studies of the effects of drugs on the behavior of animals have been playing an increasingly important role. Animal studies have been an advantage over studies with human subjects because better control of experimental variables and a possibility of using a wider range of the doses. It is also permissible to administer toxix compounds to animals. One can interfere surgically with various parts of the central nervous system while investigating the effects of the drugs. The whole field of comparative psychopharmacology has been recently reviewed”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Weckowicz (1967) "Chapter VI - Animal Studies of Hallucinogenic Drugs" in: Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond (1967) The hallucinogens. p. 555

Behavior , Study , Animals , Parting

“On homosexuals- They're more up for a bit more experimentation an' that -Podcast Series 1 Episode 2”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

On Sex

“The great majority of experimental psychologists relate to the tradition of their field in much the same way as physicists. Their look at the past might take the form of a review of the literature in a specific research area, and perhaps they would go so far as to take time off for celebrating a few icons on appropriate ceremonial occasions, but there is no room in their world for a reflective or critical history. They would gladly leave anything like that to the professional historians without any sense of having surrendered something that might have the slightest relevance to their own research interests. In the U. S. this attitude may be more widespread than elsewhere, and it is certainly accompanied by a growing tendency for the history of psychology to be taken up by historians rather than psychologists, but of course, the same attitudes are to be found wherever there are psychological laboratories.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 472

World , Way , History , Literature

“I use the example of the rainbow and of the phenomena connected with it, of which sort are the circle around the sun and the stars, likewise the rod lying at the side of the sun or of a star which appears to the eye in a straight line… called the rod by Seneca, and the circle is called the corona, which often has the colors of the rainbow. But neither Aristotle nor Avicenna, in their Natural Histories, has given us knowledge of things of this sort, nor has Seneca, who composed a special book on them. But Experimental Science makes certain of them. [The experimenter] considers rowers and he finds the same colors in the falling drops dripping from the raised oars when the solar rays penetrate drops of this sort. It is the same with waters falling from the wheels of a mill; and when a man sees the drops of dew in summer of a morning lying on the grass in the meadow or the field, he will see the colors. And in the same way when it rains, if he stands in a shady place and if the rays beyond it pass through dripping moisture, then the colors will appear in the shadow nearby; and very frequently of a night colors appear around the wax candle. Moreover, if a man in summer, when he rises from sleep and while his eyes are yet only partly opened, looks suddenly toward an aperture through which a ray of the sun enters, he will see colors. And if, while seated beyond the sun, he extend his hat before his eyes, he will see colors; and in the same way if he closes his eye, the same thing happens under the shade of the eyebrow; and again, the same phenomenon occurs through a glass vessel filled with water, placed in the rays of the sun. Or similarly if any one holding water in his mouth sprinkles it vigorously into the rays and stands to the side of the rays; and if rays in the proper position pass through an oil lamp hanging in the air, so that the light falls on the surface of the oil, colors will be produced. And so in an infinite number of ways, as well natural as artificial, colors of this sort appear, as the careful experimenter is able to discover.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

6th part Experimental Science, Ch.2 Tr. Richard McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers Vol.2 Roger Bacon to William of Ockham
Opus Majus, c. 1267

Books , Color , Way , History

“I've never been a practicing doctor. Except when I was called to the army and ordered to heal soldiers. Neither before nor then did I deal with practical medicine. The more we enter the future, the more laboratory medicine becomes something different than practical medicine. It requires specialists of a different format than those who serve at the bedside. It also requires completely different skills. I research allergy, but my experimental animal is a mouse, not a human.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Borejza, Tomasz (January 2018): Trochę bakterii nie zaszkodzi https://www.tygodnikprzeglad.pl/troche-bakterii-zaszkodzi/. Przegląd (4/2018): pp. 54–55.

Future , Animals

“The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo, even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous…”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Upanishads–II : Kena and Other Upanishads (2001), p. 355

Knowledge , Effort , Science , Future

“This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary. In the legislative arena, especially when the country is closely divided, compromises tend to be the rule the day. But when judges rule this or that policy unconstitutional, there’s little room for compromise: One side must win, the other must lose. In constitutional litigation, too, experiments and pilot programs — real-world laboratories in which ideas can be assessed on the results they produce — are not possible. Ideas are tested only in the abstract world of legal briefs and lawyers arguments. As a society, we lose the benefit of the give-and-take of the political process and the flexibility of social experimentation that only the elected branches can provide.”

Neil Gorsuch (1967) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Liberals’N’Lawsuits http://www.nationalreview.com/article/213590/liberalsnlawsuits-joseph-6 (February 7, 2005)

World , Idea , Country

“There's different types of knowledge, and this is where I believe the confusion lies. There's experimental or observational science as we call it. That's using the scientific method: observation, measurement, experiment, testing. That's what produces our technology: computers, spacecraft, jet planes, smoke detectors, looking at DNA, antibiotics, medicines and vaccines. You see, all scientists, whether Creationist or Evolutionist, actually have the same observational or experimental science. It doesn't matter if you're a Creationist or an Evolutionist: you can be a great scientist… But I want us to also understand that molecules-to-man evolution belief has nothing to do with developing technology.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham" (February 4, 2014)

Understanding , Knowledge , Science

“When the classical worldview was applied to social science, the dominant notions turned out to be struggle for survival, the profit of the individual, with at best an assumed automatic coincidence of individual and societal good (through Adam Smith's "invisible hand"). When the systemic vision inspires the theories of social science, the values of competition are mitigated by those of cooperation, and the emphasis on individualistic work ethos is tempered with a tolerance of diversity and of experimentation with institutions and practices that foster man-man and man- nature adaptation and harmony.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 12.

Nature , Science

“An explanation of a phenomenon is regarded, apparently instinctively, as the most general possible when it is a mechanical explanation. The "mechanism" of the process is the ultimate goal of experiment. Now this mechanism in general lies beyond the range of the senses; either by reason of their limitations, as in the case of the atomic structure of matter, or by the very nature of the supposed mechanism, as in the theory of the ether. The only way to bridge the gap between the machinery of the physical process and the world of sense-impressions is to think out some consequence of that mechanism. This we will call the hypothesis. The hypothesis, resting still on the mechanical basis, is yet beyond the range of direct experimental investigation; but if, by mathematical reasoning, a consequence of the hypothesis can be deduced, this will often lie within the range of experimental inquiry, and thus a test of the soundness of the original mechanical conception may be instituted.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Lie , World , Way , Mathematics

“In reality, experimenters are cussed individuals, eager to prove the theoreticians wrong whenever possible.”

Richard Dalitz (1925–2006) Australian physicist

R. H. Dalitz, Fundamental Developments, Nature 314 387–388 (1985).

Reality

“The mathematical forms of order which the mind of a physicist manipulates coincides "miraculously" with experimental measurements.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Psyche and Matter (1992), p. 269

Mathematics

“The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other …”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 6

Life , Problem , Effort , Time

“Science does not speak of the world in the language of words alone, and in many cases it simply cannot do so. The natural language of science is a synergistic integration of words, diagrams, pictures, graphs, maps, equations, tables, charts, and other forms of visual and mathematical expression… [Science thus consists of] the languages of visual representation, the languages of mathematical symbolism, and the languages of experimental operations.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Jay Lemke (2003), "Teaching all the languages of science: Words , symbols, images and actions," p. 3; as cited in: Scott, Phil, Hilary Asoko, and John Leach. "Student conceptions and conceptual learning in science." Handbook of research on science education (2007): 31-56.

World , Mathematics , Nature , Science