Experimental Science Quotes

#1. In teaching man, experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective reality of things, will be hidden from him forever and that he can only know relations.

Claude Bernard

#2. The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.

Roger Bacon

#3. Experimental science hardly ever affords us more than approximations to the truth; and whenever many agents are concerned we are in great danger of being mistaken.

Humphry Davy

#4. Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#5. Experimental science is the queen of knowledge.

Roger Bacon

#6. 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

#7. Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on.

Oliver Heaviside

#8. 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 L. Perl

#9. Eve and the apple was the first great step in experimental science.

James Bridie

#10. I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#11. 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

#12. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Clifford Geertz

#13. Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.

Michael Faraday

#14. Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don't realize how thoroughly they've departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science.

Sam Kean

#15. Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds.

Michael Faraday

#16. 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

#17. The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

Albert Einstein

#18. Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.

Ian Hacking

#19. One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

Matthew Stewart

#20. Experimental investigation, to borrow a phrase employed by Kepler respecting the testing of hypotheses, is "a very great thief of time." Sometimes it costs many days to determine a fact that can be stated in a line.

John William Draper

#21. One is almost tempted to say ... at last I can almost see a bond. But that will never be, for a bond does not really exist at all: it is a most convenient fiction which, as we have seen, is convenient both to experimental and theoretical chemists.

Charles Coulson

#22. It's sort of nice in more general terms to see that computational science, computational biology is being recognized. It's become a very large field, and it's always in some ways been the poor sister, or the ugly sister, to experimental biology.

Michael Levitt

#23. One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions ... like a state of sheer terror.

William Kenneth Hartmann

#24. 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

#25. While Einstein was still a patent clerk he had studied the work of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, for whom the goal of science was not to discern the nature of reality, but to describe experimental data, the 'facts', as economically as possible.

Manjit Kumar

#26. Even in the dark times between experimental breakthroughs, there always continues a steady evolution of theoretical ideas, leading almost imperceptibly to changes in previous beliefs.

Steven Weinberg

#27. Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics

Werner Heisenberg

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.

Alan Lightman

#31. I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#32. Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.

David Deutsch

#33. A hypothesis or theory is clear, decisive, and positive, but it is believed by no one but the man who created it. Experimental findings, on the other hand, are messy, inexact things, which are believed by everyone except the man who did that work.

Harlow Shapley

#34. Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world.

Carl Jung

#35. THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.

Orson Scott Card

#36. The trouble is that you won't get the scientists to agree on a course of action. It is almost instinctive in science to accept contrary views, because disagreeing gives you guidance to experimental tests of ideas - your own and those offered by others ... .

Frederick Seitz

#37. My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance.

Philip Warren Anderson

#38. Hence, even in the domain of natural science the aid of the experimental method becomes indispensable whenever the problem set is the analysis of transient and impermanent phenomena, and not merely the observation of persistent and relatively constant objects.

Wilhelm Wundt

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

Francois Arago

#40. Experimental evidence has now verified that nuclear reactions can be caused to occur in heavily loaded solids. It is premature to predict where this is headed from an applications point of view, but the basic science is clearly revolutionary.

George H. Miley

#41. If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics.

Pierre Duhem

#42. 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

#43. Facts, and facts alone, are the foundation of science ... When one devotes oneself to experimental research it is in order to augment the sum of known facts, or to discover their mutual relations.

Francois Magendie

#44. 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

#45. The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next

Bertrand Russell

#46. Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable.

Walter Lang

#47. Taking him for all and all, I think it will be conceded that Michael Faraday was the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen.

John Tyndall

#48. I studied science and journalism at the University of Colorado and then got interested in experimental film there and started doing my own films.

Eric Darnell

#49. I don't mind showing you my dick, Rosie. It could be for experimental purposes. Science. Although, it wouldn't be very fair to all the other men you will probably see, since I'm so big and girthy.

Meghan Quinn