Experimentation Quotes - Page 4

• People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is - just be a little kinder.

  Aldous Huxley

  Years, People, Technique

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• It’s a similar feeling from being in a community of punk rockers as a teenager and the feeling I still get today when I’m in a community of skeptical scientists. The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. You challenge the doctrine in order to make progress. The thrill of science is the process. It’s a social process. It’s a process of collective discovery. It’s debate, it’s experimentation and it’s verification of claims that might be false. It’s the greatest foundation for a society.

  Greg Graffin

  Teenager, Discovery, Order

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• My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing. Therefore you better be trying stuff at an insanely rapid pace. You want to be screwing around with nearly everything. Relentless experimentation was probably important in the 1970s-now it’s do or die.

  Tom Peters

  Sweet, Real, Important

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• ... the only argument against vivisection that will be seen to have lasting power - that we do not improve human society by means that debase human character.

  Jon Wynne-Tyson

  Character, Mean, Animal

  Jon Wynne-Tyson (1972). “The Civilised Alternative: A Pattern for Protest”

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• Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing, in accurately formulating experimental facts and drawing up a theory from them. It began with the invention of a possible world, or a fragment thereof, which was then compared by experimentation with the real world. And it was this constant dialogue between imagination and experiment that allowed one to form an increasingly fine-grained conception of what is called reality.

  Francois Jacob

  Real, Drawing, Imagination

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• We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure-all your life.

  John W. Gardner

  Courage, Powerful, Fear

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• Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Work, Believe, Passion

  Margaret J. Wheatley, Myron E. Rogers (1998). “A Simpler Way”, p.21, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.

  Henry Steele Commager

  America, Liberty, Libertarian

  "Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent". Book by Henry Steele Commager, 1954.

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• Problems in human engineering will receive during the coming years the same genius and attention which the nineteenth century gave to the more material forms of engineering.
  We have laid good foundations for industrial prosperity, now we want to assure the happiness and growth of the workers through vocational education, vocational guidance, and wisely managed employment departments. A great field for industrial experimentation and statemanship is opening up.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Science, Engineering, Years

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• The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek.

  Claude Bernard

  Truth, Experiments, True Worth

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• Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Science, Giving, Departure

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• I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.

  George Wald

  Nature, Science, Hands

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• I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

  Greg Graffin

  Atheist, Believe, Bills

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• I believe in gradual experimentation with running shoes.

  Bill Rodgers

  Running, Believe, Shoes

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• I have great hope and faith, but it's a humanistic faith based in facts; you have to believe that facts exist. We can all arrive at the same facts if we engage in the process of experimentation, observation, and verification, which can solve more of the world's major problems than a debate over whether God does or doesn't exist.

  Greg Graffin

  Believe, Doe, World

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• At no period of [Michael Faraday's] unmatched career was he interested in utility. He was absorbed in disentangling the riddles of the universe, at first chemical riddles, in later periods, physical riddles. As far as he cared, the question of utility was never raised. Any suspicion of utility would have restricted his restless curiosity. In the end, utility resulted, but it was never a criterion to which his ceaseless experimentation could be subjected.

  Abraham Flexner

  Science, Careers, Curiosity

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• My science teachers always encouraged their classes to 'go out and discover something' because all scientific endeavors depend on observation and experimentation. Through such pursuits, anyone can find something new to science, and if it's truly novel, the entire edifice of science might have to be restructured.

  Greg Graffin

  Teacher, Class, Might

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• It is only through failure and through experiment that we learn and grow.

  Isaac Stern

  Failure, Experience, Grows

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• ...the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. the universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.

  Michio Kaku

  Writing, Years, Law

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• This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Strong, Crazy, Animal

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• The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Success, Real, Numbers

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• The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.

  David Ogilvy

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

  David Ogilvy (1963). “Confessions of an advertising man”, Holiday House

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

  Paul Theroux

  Creative, Cooking, Kitchen

  Paul Theroux (2014). “Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents”, p.180, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There are two men in each one of us: the scientist, he who starts with a clear field and desires to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observations, experimentation and reasoning, and the man of sentiment, the man of belief, the man who mourns his dead children, and who cannot, alas, prove that he will see them again, but who believes that he will, and lives in the hope – the man who will not die like a vibrio, but who feels that the force that is within him cannot die.

  Louis Pasteur

  Children, Believe, Men

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• The foundations of population genetics were laid chiefly by mathematical deduction from basic premises contained in the works of Mendel and Morgan and their followers. Haldane, Wright, and Fisher are the pioneers of population genetics whose main research equipment was paper and ink rather than microscopes, experimental fields, Drosophila bottles, or mouse cages. Theirs is theoretical biology at its best, and it has provided a guiding light for rigorous quantitative experimentation and observation.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Science, Light, Ink

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