Experiments Quotes - Page 11

• Now I know what the atom looks like.

  Ernest Rutherford

  Science, Atoms, Looks

  "Rutherford, Simple Genius". Book by David Wilson, 1983.

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• Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

  W. H. Auden

  Funny, Science, Simple

  A CertainWorld "Behaviorism" (1970)

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• Only by following out the injunction of our great predecessor [William Harvey] to search out and study the secrets of Nature by way of experiment, can we hope to attain to a comprehension of 'the wisdom of the body and the understanding of the heart,' and thereby to the mastery of disease and pain, which will enable us to relieve the burden of mankind.

  Ernest Starling

  Nature, Pain, Heart

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• Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to choose-Experiment has no fewer.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Science, Reason, Form

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• Salt water when it turns into vapour becomes sweet, and the vapour does not form salt water when it condenses again. This I know by experiment. The same thing is true in every case of the kind: wine and all fluids that evaporate and condense back into a liquid state become water. They all are water modified by a certain admixture, the nature of which determines their flavour.

  Aristotle

  Sweet, Wine, Science

  Aristotle, (2014). “Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 1: The Revised Oxford Translation”, p.582, Princeton University Press

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• Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Writing, Science, Men

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• The artist does not illustrate science; ... [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations.

  Lewis Mumford

  Science, Artist, Expression

  "Revolt in the Arts: A Survey of the Creation, Distribution and Appreciation of Art in America". Book by Oliver Martin Sayler, p. 117, 1930.

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• The child which overbalances itself in learning to walk is experimenting on the law of gravity.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Children, Learning, Science

  William Stanley Jevons (1883). “Methods of Social Reform: And Other Papers”

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• The great experimental principle, then, is doubt, that philosophic doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative, and from which the virtues most valuable to investigators in physiology and medicine are derived.

  Claude Bernard

  Freedom, Science, Medicine

  Claude Bernard “Experimental Medicine”, Transaction Publishers

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• The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics.

  Carl Sagan

  War, Winter, Science

  "A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race". Book by Carl Sagan, p. 26, 1990.

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• The progression of physical science is much more connected with your prosperity than is usually imagined. You owe to experimental philosophy some of the most important and peculiar of your advantages. It is not by foreign conquests chiefly that you are become great, but by a conquest of nature in your own country.

  Humphry Davy

  Country, Philosophy, Science

  Humphry Davy (1840). “The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy (etc.)”, p.358

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• The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to fill bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.

  Isaac Newton

  Science, Quality, Body

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• The rigid electron is in my view a monster in relation to Maxwell's equations, whose innermost harmony is the principle of relativity... the rigid electron is no working hypothesis, but a working hindrance. Approaching Maxwell's equations with the concept of the rigid electron seems to me the same thing as going to a concert with your ears stopped up with cotton wool. We must admire the courage and the power of the school of the rigid electron which leaps across the widest mathematical hurdles with fabulous hypotheses, with the hope to land safely over there on experimental-physical ground.

  Hermann Minkowski

  School, Science, Views

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• There is more evidence to prove that saltness [of the sea] is due to the admixture of some substance, besides that which we have adduced. Make a vessel of wax and put it in the sea, fastening its mouth in such a way as to prevent any water getting in. Then the water that percolates through the wax sides of the vessel is sweet, the earthy stuff, the admixture of which makes the water salt, being separated off as it were by a filter.

  Aristotle

  Sweet, Science, Sea

  Aristotle, (2014). “Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 1: The Revised Oxford Translation”, p.583, Princeton University Press

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• There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Science, Men, Doubt

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.236, Ravenio Books

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• There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Nature, Science, Understanding

  The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci Philosophy (p. 64)

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• There is one experiment which I always like to try, because it proves something whichever way it goes. A solution of iodine in water is shaken with bone-black, filtered and tested with starch paste. If the colorless solution does not turn the starch blue, the experiment shows how completely charcoal extracts iodine from aqueous solution. If the starch turns blue, the experiment shows that the solution, though apparently colorless, still contains iodine which can be detected by means of a sensitive starch test.

  Wilder Dwight Bancroft

  Mean, Science, Iodine

  Wilder Dwight Bancroft (1926). “Applied Colloid Chemistry, General Theory”

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• There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.

  George Wald

  Regret, Science, Animal

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• Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted [i.e., qualities that cannot be increased and diminished] and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally.

  Isaac Newton

  Taken, Science, Quality

  Isaac Newton (1999). “The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”, p.795, Univ of California Press

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• Time... is an essential requirement for effective research. An investigator may be given a palace to live in, a perfect laboratory to work in, he may be surrounded by all the conveniences money can provide; but if his time is taken from him he will remain sterile.

  Walter Bradford Cannon

  Taken, Science, Perfect

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• Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life.

  John Dewey

  Science, Giving, Curiosity

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Joe R. Burnett (2008). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924: 1899-1901”, p.145, SIU Press

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• We have usually no knowledge that any one factor will exert its effects independently of all others that can be varied, or that its effects are particularly simply related to variations in these other factors.

  Ronald Fisher

  Science, Variation, Effects

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• What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the 'new system of chemical philosophy'), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Philosophy, Science, Law

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.133, University of Chicago Press

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• X-rays ... I am afraid of them. I stopped experimenting with them two years ago, when I came near to losing my eyesight and Dally, my assistant practically lost the use of both of his arms.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Science, Two, Years

  "Edison Fears Hidden Perils of the X-Rays". "New York World" Newspaper, August 3, 1903.

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• You all have learned reliance
  On the sacred teachings of Science,
  So I hope, through life, you will never decline
  In spite of philistine Defiance
  To do what all good scientists do.
  Experiment.
  Make it your motto day and night.
  Experiment.
  And it will lead you to the light.

  Cole Porter

  Teaching, Learning, Science

  Cole Porter (1954). “103 lyrics”

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