Experiment Quotes

So [in mathematics] we get to play and imagine whatever we want and make patterns and ask questions about them. But how do we answer these questions? It’s not at all like science. There’s no experiment I can do ... The only way to get at the truth about our imaginations is to use our imaginations, and that is hard work.

~ Paul Lockhart

Two friends... let's put them place... they have never been in jail, give them a knife some reasonable conflicts some doubts and watch the effect.

~ Deyth Banger

Three great actions; explore, experiment and experience.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is a time and place for electromagnetic shielding and I regard it as a last resort due to the long term biological problems that I have observed with it over the years in plant growth experiments.

~ Steven Magee

Life is a sacred experiment.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Never give up your right to be wrong, and be sure to give others that right too.

~ Tim Fargo

Bradshaw especially didn't like the use of the word experiment in regard to social conditions. Experiments included of necessity, expendable components. Failure was a precursor to success. When the components were human, who had the audacity to use, lose them, toss them away?

~ Bernadette Pajer

[At the beginning of modern science], a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgments according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in leading-strings; for otherwise accidental observations, made according to no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law, which is yet what reason seeks and requires. Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiments thought in accordance with these principles - yet in order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. Thus even physics owes the advantageous revolution in its way of thinking to the inspiration that what reason would not be able to know of itself and has to learn from nature, it has to seek in the latter (though not merely ascribe to it) in accordance with what reason itself puts into nature. This is how natural science was first brought to the secure course of a science after groping about for so many centuries.

~ Immanuel Kant

Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

~ Francis William Aston

Theories might inspire you, but experiments will advance you.

~ Amit Kalantri

The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

~ Carlos Fuentes

The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.

~ Alessandro Volta

Life for me is just a result of experiments being performed by far more developed creatures.

~ Hasil Paudyal

I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon, at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make [it] out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles. If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is; for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile. It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

~ Mark Twain

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.

~ Galileo Galilei

Some might question whether it makes sense to talk about setting up the experiment and running it again with exactly the same conditions--that it is, in fact, impossible. Locally, you might get the conditions exactly the same, but you have to embed the experiment in the universe, and that has moved on. You can't rewind the wave function of the universe and rerun it. The universe is a one-time-only experiment that includes us as part of its wave function, and there's no going back.

~ Marcus Du Sautoy

Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government.

~ Carl Cohen

The USA government encourages gun ownership at the same time as they have allowed environmental radiation levels to become ridiculously high powered and this continues to increase annually. It will be interesting to see where this government experiment eventually takes the USA!

~ Steven Magee

I was born unworthy. - X-10

~ Donna Galanti

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things.As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.

~ Tim Maudlin

Yes, I'm a materialist. I'm willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I'm unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders is because I'm locked into a world-view that demands evidence rather than blind faith, a view that insists upon the replication of all experiments — particularly those that appear to show violations of a rational world — and a view which requires open examination of the methods used to carry out those experiments.

~ James Randi

Any constituency that needs amending, is a prototype in error.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new, it alone can give us certainty.

~ Henri Poincaré

I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work.

~ Nikola Tesla

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

~ Sigmund Freud

Literary Agent: “I meant manuscript wise.”Tina: “Ohh. Um, yes. I’ve brought a few with me, just some rough drafts. (shuffle, shuffle) You might say something of an experiment.

~ Christina Engela

Try it out yourself. Test your idea with an experimental project. See what works and what doesn't. Then move forward or move on.

~ Richie Norton

To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.

~ Carlo Rovelli

To experiment with love is to play with fire.

~ Gabriella Jording

If everything is an illusion. To experiment is to find out what's real.

~ Matthew Donnelly

You can always try another approach, even change your subject when a scientific strategy or experiment fails.

~ Ada Yonath

Experiment to discover how little you need.

~ Alan Cohen

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

The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

~ Lev Grossman

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

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.

~ François Magendie

I took a glass retort, capable of containing eight ounces of water, and distilled fuming spirit of nitre according to the usual method. In the beginning the acid passed over red, then it became colourless, and lastly again all red: no sooner did this happen, then I took away the receiver; and tied to the mouth of the retort a bladder emptied of air, which I had moistened in its inside with milk of lime lac calcis, (i.e. lime-water, containing more quicklime than water can dissolve) to prevent its being corroded by the acid. Then I continued the distillation, and the bladder gradually expanded. Here-upon I left every thing to cool, tied up the bladder, and took it off from the mouth of the retort.— I filled a ten-ounce glass with this air and put a small burning candle into it; when immediately the candle burnt with a large flame, of so vivid a light that it dazzled the eyes. I mixed one part of this air with three parts of air, wherein fire would not burn; and this mixture afforded air, in every respect familiar to the common sort. Since this air is absolutely necessary for the generation of fire, and makes about one-third of our common air, I shall henceforth, for shortness sake call it empyreal air, [literally fire-air] the air which is unserviceable for the fiery phenomenon, and which makes abut two-thirds of common air, I shall for the future call foul air [literally corrupted air].

~ Carl Wilhelm Scheele

I have always loved to begin with the facts, to observe them, to walk in the light of experiment and demonstrate as much as possible, and to discuss the results.

~ Giovanni Arduino

Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration.

~ Gregory Benford

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.

~ Jeff Bezos