Experimental Science Quotes - Page 2

• In the experimental sciences, the epochs of the most brilliant progress are almost always separated by long intervals of almost absolute repose.

  Francois Arago

  Science, Long, Progress

  François Arago, Robert GRANT (F.R.A.S.), Baden Powell, William Henry SMYTH (Rear Admiral.) (1857). “Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men ... Translated by ... W. H. Smyth ... the Rev. Baden Powell ... and R. Grant”, p.265

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• The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate.

  Edmund Burke

  Real, Practice, Political

  Edmund Burke (1811). “Maxims and opinions, moral, political and economical, with characters, from the works of ... Edmund Burke”, p.80

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• Philosophers of science constantly discuss theories and representation of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world. This is odd, because 'experimental method' used to be just another name for scientific method.... I hope [to] initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.

  Ian Hacking

  Science, Technology, Reality

  Ian Hacking (1983). “Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science”, p.135, Cambridge University Press

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• An experimental science is supposed to perform experiments that find generalities. It's not just supposed to tally up a long list of individual cases and their unique life histories. That's butterfly collecting.

  Richard Lewontin

  Butterfly, Unique, Long

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• The theory of numbers, more than any other branch of mathematics, began by being an experimental science. Its most famous theorems have all been conjectured, sometimes a hundred years or more before they were proved; and they have been suggested by the evidence of a mass of computations.

  G. H. Hardy

  Years, Numbers, Branches

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• My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.

  Martin Lewis Perl

  Science, Men, Ideas

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• There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.

  Richard Lewontin

  Events, Narrative, Kind

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• 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

  Art, Two, Knowing

  "Physics, 1991-1995" by G sta Ekspong, 1997.

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• If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.

  Carl Sagan

  Past, Ideas, Mind

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• [I]t is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Men, Civilization, Roots

  Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1960). “the Revolt of the Masses”

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• With the aid of these active experimental sciences man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation; and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress of the experimental sciences.

  Claude Bernard

  Real, Science, Men

  Claude Bernard “Experimental Medicine”, Transaction Publishers

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• Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap.

  Vladimir Arnold

  Physics, Mathematics, Natural

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