Experiments Quotes - Page 13

• [Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally - taking it as their best available view of reality, at least unil some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

  David Quammen

  Mean, Reality, Views

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• The great problem of today is, how to subject all physical phenomena to dynamical laws. With all the experimental devices, and all the mathematical appliances of this generation, the human mind has been baffled in its attempts to construct a universal science of physics.

  Joseph Lovering

  Science, Law, Mind

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• Conclusions
  I. A curve has been found representing the frequency distribution of standard deviations of samples drawn from a normal population.
  II. A curve has been found representing the frequency distribution of values of the means of such samples, when these values are measured from the mean of the population in terms of the standard deviation of the sample...
  III. Tables are given by which it can be judged whether a series of experiments, however short, have given a result which conforms to any required standard of accuracy or whether it is necessary to continue the investigation.

  William Sealy Gosset

  Mean, Curves, Tables

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• A good physiological experiment like a good physical one requires that it should present anywhere, at any time, under identical conditions, the same certain and unequivocal phenomena that can always be confirmed.

  Johannes Peter Muller

  Science, Certain, Should

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• A scientific or technical study always consists of the following three steps:
  1. One decides the objective.
  2. One considers the method.
  3. One evaluates the method in relation to the objective.

  Genichi Taguchi

  Science, Steps, Three

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• Above all, I regret that scientific experiments-some of them mine-should have produced such a terrible weapon as the hydrogen bomb. Regret, with all my soul, but not guilt.

  Harold Urey

  Regret, Science, Should Have

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• Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.

  Edwin Howard Armstrong

  Art, Book, Science

  "Electronics" by P. Arun, (p. 310), 2005.

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• But experiments went for nothing,-dualism had sworn to uphold its position.

  Auguste Laurent

  Science, Position, Dualism

  David M. Knight, Auguste Laurent (1998). “The Development of Chemistry, 1789-1914: Chemical method”, Routledge

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• Do experimental work but keep in mind that other investigators in the same field will consider your discoveries as less than one fourth as important as they seem to you.

  Charles Manning Child

  Science, Discovery, Mind

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• I built the solenoid and with great expectations late one evening I pressed the switch which sent a current of 40 amperes through the coil. The result was spectacular-a deafening explosion, the apparatus disappeared, all windows were blown in or out, a wall caved in, and thus ended my pioneering experiment on liquid hydrogen cooled coils!

  Nicholas Kurti

  Wall, Science, Expectations

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• I do not think the division of the subject into two parts - into applied mathematics and experimental physics a good one, for natural philosophy without experiment is merely mathematical exercise, while experiment without mathematics will neither sufficiently discipline the mind or sufficiently extend our knowledge in a subject like physics.

  Balfour Stewart

  Philosophy, Exercise, Science

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• I have always attached great importance to the manner in which an experiment is set up and conducted ... the experiment should be set up to open as many windows as possible on the unforeseen.

  Frederic Joliot-Curie

  Science, Important, Window

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• I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the ordinary things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep - great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth’s magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.

  Edward Mills Purcell

  Eye, Winter, Science

  "Research in Nuclear Magnetism". Edward Mills Purcell's Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1952.

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• If diphtheria is a disease caused by a microorganism, it is essential that three postulates be fulfilled. The fulfilment of these postulates is necessary in order to demonstrate strictly the parasitic nature of a disease:
  1) The organism must be shown to be constantly present in characteristic form and arrangement in the diseased tissue.
  2) The organism which, from its behaviour appears to be responsible for the disease, must be isolated and grown in pure culture.
  3) The pure culture must be shown to induce the disease experimentally.
  An early statement of Koch's postulates.

  Friedrich Loeffler

  Science, Order, Behaviour

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• It has the property of detonating very violently in certain circumstances. On one occasion a small amount of ether solution of pyroglycerin condensed in a glass bowl. ... When the bowl was heated over a spirit lamp, an extremely violent explosion occurred, which shattered it into small fragments. On another occasion a drop was heated in a test-tube, and exploded with such violence that the glass splinters cut deep into my face and hands, and hurt other people who were standing some distance off in the room.

  Ascanio Sobrero

  Hurt, Distance, Cutting

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• No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment.

  William Ian Beardmore Beveridge

  Believe, Science, Discovery

  "The Art of Scientific Investigation".

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• One should avoid carrying out an experiment requiring more than 10 per cent accuracy.

  Walther Nernst

  Science, Should, Accuracy

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• Over the last century, physicists have used light quanta electrons, alpha particles, X-rays, gamma-rays, protons, neutrons and exotic sub-nuclear particles for this purpose. Much important information about the target atoms or nuclei or their assemblage has been obtained in this way. In witness of this importance one can point to the unusual concentration of scattering enthusiasts among earlier Nobel Laureate physicists. One could say that physicists just love to perform or interpret scattering experiments.

  Clifford Shull

  Science, Light, Important

  Clifford G. Shull's Speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1994.

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• Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?

  John Constable

  Nature, Philosophy, Science

  John E. Thornes, John Constable (1999). “John Constable's Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science”, p.51, A&C Black

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• Professor Brown: 'Since this slide was made,' he opined, 'My students have re-examined the errant points and I am happy to report that all fall close to the [straight] line.' Questioner: 'Professor Brown, I am delighted that the points which fell off the line proved, on reinvestigation, to be in compliance. I wonder, however, if you have had your students reinvestigate all these points that previously fell on the line to find out how many no longer do so?'

  Herbert C. Brown

  Fall, Science, Lines

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• Science gains from it [the pendulum] more than one can expect. With its huge dimensions, the apparatus presents qualities that one would try in vain to communicate by constructing it on a small [scale], no matter how carefully. Already the regularity of its motion promises the most conclusive results. One collects numbers that, compared with the predictions of theory, permit one to appreciate how far the true pendulum approximates or differs from the abstract system called 'the simple pendulum'.

  Leon Foucault

  Science, Simple, Numbers

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• Some months ago we discovered that certain light elements emit positrons under the action of alpha particles. Our latest experiments have shown a very striking fact: when an aluminium foil is irradiated on a polonium preparation [alpha ray emitter], the emission of positrons does not cease immediately when the active preparation is removed: the foil remains radioactive and the emission of radiation decays exponentially as for an ordinary radio-element. We observed the same phenomenon with boron and magnesium.

  Frederic Joliot-Curie

  Science, Light, Preparation

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• That no generally applicable law of the formulation and development of hybrids has yet been successfully formulated can hardly astonish anyone who is acquainted with the extent of the task and who can appreciate the difficulties with which experiments of this kind have to contend.

  Gregor Mendel

  Success, Science, Law

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• The experiment left no doubt that, as far as accuracy of measurement went, the resistance disappeared. At the same time, however, something unexpected occurred. The disappearance did not take place gradually but abruptly. From 1/500 the resistance at 4.2K, it could be established that the resistance had become less than a thousand-millionth part of that at normal temperature. Thus the mercury at 4.2K has entered a new state, which, owing to its particular electrical properties, can be called the state of superconductivity.

  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

  Science, Doubt, Owing

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• The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics.

  Udny Yule

  Science, Opportunity, Data

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