Experiments Quotes

“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?”
― Werner Heisenberg

“If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment.”
― Ernest Rutherford

“I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it?”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the 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 M. Purcell

“If you want to find out if someone is a true bookworm or not, give them a thousand page novel and see what happens.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“Every day, hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature. Many of them don't have much to do with evolution - they're observations about the details of physiology, biochemistry, development, and so on - but many of them do. And every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth. Every fossil that we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every organ system that we dissect, supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally deduced from the fossil record. And, as natural selection predicts, we find no species with adaptations that only benefit a different species. We do find dead genes and vestigial organs, incomprehensible under the idea of special creation. Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth.”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True

“It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defense - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The most effective experimenters are usually those who give much thought to the problem beforehand and resolve it into crucial questions and then give much thought to designing experiments to answer the questions.”
― William Ian Beardmore Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation

“Subsequent experiments conducted by Tom Danley in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and in Chambers above the King's Chamber suggest that the pyramid was constructed with a sonic purpose. Danley identifies four resident frequencies, or notes, that are enhanced by the structure of the pyramid, and by the materials used in its construction.
The notes form an F Sharp chord, which according to ancient Egyptian texts were the harmonic of our planet. Moreover, Danley's tests show that these frequencies are present in the King's Chamber even when no sounds are being produced. They are there in frequencies that range from 16 Hertz down to 1/2 Hertz, well below the range of human hearing. According to Danley, these vibrations are caused by the wind blowing across the ends of the so-called shafts—in the same way as sounds are created when one blows across the top of a bottle.”
― Christopher Dunn, The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt

“[Q]uantum objects present us with a choice of languages, but it’s too easily forgotten that this is precisely what it is: a struggle to formulate the right words, not a description of the reality behind them. Quantum objects are not sometimes particles and sometimes waves, like a football fan changing her team allegiance according to last week’s results. Quantum objects are what they are, and we have no reason to suppose that ‘what they are’ changes in any meaningful way depending on how we try to look at them. Rather, all we can say is that what we measure sometimes looks like what we would expect to see if we were measuring discrete little ball-like entities, while in other experiments it looks like the behaviour expected of waves of the same kind as those of sound travelling in air, or that wrinkle and swell on the sea surface. So the phrase ‘wave–particle duality’ doesn’t really refer to quantum objects at all, but to the interpretation of experiments – which is to say, to our human-scale view of things.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“Einstein and his colleagues made the perfectly reasonable assumption of locality: that the properties of a particle are localized on that particle, and what happens here can’t affect what happens there without some way of transmitting the effects across the intervening space. It seems so self-evident that it hardly appears to be an assumption at all. But this locality is just what quantum entanglement undermines – which is why ‘spooky action at a distance’ is precisely the wrong way to look at it. We can’t regard particle A and particle B in the EPR experiment as separate entities, even though they are separated in space. As far as quantum mechanics is concerned, entanglement makes them both parts of a single object. Or to put it another way, the spin of particle A is not located solely on A in the way that the redness of a cricket ball is located on the cricket ball. In quantum mechanics, properties can be non-local. Only if we accept Einstein’s assumption of locality do we need to tell the story in terms of a measurement on particle A ‘influencing’ the spin of particle B. Quantum non-locality is the alternative to that view.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“She suddenly understood the thought experiments better based on this feeling, the uncanniness of someone you love being able to abruptly articulate a single feeling. Friendship, family, and romance breed a telepathy that comes from kinship.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“Beware the purists, the doctrinaires. It has been by the empirical method largely, by way of trial and error, that we have come so far. America itself is an experiment and we must bear that always in mind.”
― David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For

“What’s going on? On the one hand, analogical thinking seems to be our birthright. Metaphorical connections saturate our language, drive our science, enliven our literature, burst out (at least occasionally) in children’s speech, and remind us of things past. On the other hand, when experimentalists lead the horse to water, they can’t make it drink.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“A general challenge for the models we have written here, but for theory more generally in biology, is to be ahead of the experiments. Ultimately, we want to suggest exciting and revealing experiments that have not yet been conceived or undertaken. One of the critical frontiers in this area is to design experiments that showcase the uniquely nonequilibrium features of living systems, providing an impetus for new kinds of statistical physics.”
― Rob Phillips, The Molecular Switch: Signaling and Allostery

“[...] He also used his medical practice as a source of experimental data, but was not above using himself as a test subject. There is something so wonderful - and more than a little ironic - in this image of Snow the teetotaler, arguably the finest medical mind of his generation, performing his research. He sits alone in his cluttered flat, frogs croaking around him, illuminated only by candlelight. After a few minutes tinkering with his latest experimental inhaler, he fastens the mouthpiece over his face and releases the gas. Within seconds, his head hits the desk. Then, minutes later, he wakes, consults his watch through blurred vision. He reaches for his pen, and starts recording the data.”
― Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

“He began to realize the severity of the situation. If he could not clean up this mess by the end of the weekend, it could blow up in his face. His experiments would never reach completion. He could lose his job and years of work would have gone to waste. It was possible he could even face criminal charges. No, he could not let it come down to that. He had to resolve this matter tonight. His very future depended on it.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“In the rush to market, experiments have been carried out on a large scale in the natural environment, when controlled laboratory testing would have been far more effective and informative. The British Government sanctioned large-scale planting of genetically modified plants in order to test whether their pollen spread only a few meters (as expected) and to make sure that the new gene would not be spontaneously incorporated into other species of plants (ditto). It turned out that the pollen spread for miles, and the new genes could transfer without difficulty to other plants. Effects like this could, for example, create pesticide-resistant strains of weeds. By the time the experiment had revealed that the conventional wisdom was wrong, there was no way to get the pollen, or its genes, back. Simple laboratory tests – such as painting pollen onto plants directly – could have established the same facts more cheaply, without releasing anything into the environment. It was a bit like fireproofing chemical by spraying it on a city and setting the place alight, with the added twist that the ‘fire’ might spread indefinitely if, contrary to expectations, it took hold.”
― Ian Stewart

“My experiment is upstairs. I have it there because you know how my mom is with bugs and if she inadvertently sees it, she’ll call animal control.”
― Adrian Siska, The Next Step

“Truth be told, the reality show itself quickly degenerated into a televisual soap opera that was not that different than old variety shows made for large audiences. And its audience was amplified at the usual rate of competing media, which leads to the self- propagation of the show via a prophetic method: self-fulfilling prophecy. In the end, the ratings for the show play part of the spiral and return cycle of the advertising flame. But all of this is of little interest. It is only the original idea which has any value: submitting a group to a sensory deprivation experiment ( Which in other times was a form of calculated torture. But are we not in the middle of exploring all the historical forms of torture, served in homeopathic doses, under the guise of mass culture or avant-garde art? This is precisely one of the principle themes of contemporary art.), in order to record the behavior of human molecules within a vacuum - and no doubt with the design of watching them tear each other apart in the artificial promiscuity. We have not yet reached this point, but this existential micro-situation functions as a universal metaphor for the modern being, holed up in his personal loft, which is no longer his physical or mental universe. It is his digital and tactile universe, of Turing’s “spectral body”, of the digital man, captured within the labyrinth of the networks, of man turned into his own (white) mouse.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis

“Experiments are never used to generate new paradigms, but to provide data to be interpreted by the current prevailing data, the “establishment” paradigm. Scientists claim to support a falsification principle, and to strenuously attempt to falsify their theories. This is the uttermost self-delusion. Scientists in fact go to tremendous lengths to defend their paradigm against falsification, and to deny that any falsification has taken place even when the data is unambiguous that it has. Scientists will simply reinterpret the results of any inconvenient experiments to explain away any anomalies, or they will add ad hoc hypotheses to bolster existing theories rather than discard those theories.”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“The Polite Wassermann. Margaret Trabert lay on the blood-shot candlewick of the bedspread, unsure whether to dress now that Trabert had taken the torn flying jacket from his wardrobe. All day he had been listening to the news bulletins on the pirate stations, his eyes hidden behind the dark glasses as if deliberately concealing himself from the white walls of the apartment and its unsettled dimensions. He stood by the window with his back to her, playing with the photographs of the isolation volunteers. He looked down at her naked body, with its unique geometry of touch and feeling, as exposed now as the faces of the test subjects, codes of insoluble nightmares. The sense of her body’s failure, like the incinerated musculatures of the three astronauts whose after-deaths were now being transmitted from Cape Kennedy, had dominated their last week together. He pointed to the pallid face of a young man whose photograph he had pinned above the bed like the icon of some algebraic magus. ‘Kline, Coma, Xero - there was a fourth pilot on board the capsule. You’ve caught him in your womb.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“There is one group of comparative psychologists who spend a lot of time training chimpanzees to do things that humans can do like use language and solve problems. This is mostly because the researches really like having pet chimps and impressing their friends.”
― Madison Hamill, Specimen

“Going from looking after my child every day to having every day free was what I needed to recover my health. It was limiting what experiments I could run on my health, such as prolonged camping in nature, spending a lot of time outdoors near sea level and performing altitude tests.”
― Steven Magee

“Many times, we're told not to explore what we want. And sometimes it is for a good reason. But at other times, it is either for our protection or for the protection of others.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Tinkering is a fun way to learn about the world around you! You get to play with materials, experiment, and work through ideas.”
― Ryan Jenkins, The Tinkering Workshop: Explore, Invent & Build with Everyday Materials; 100 Hands-On STEAM Projects

“To reach the truth, it must be at the absolute level. But does the absolute truth exist, and what does it mean? Do ideas represent truths? To what extent do ideas represent truths? These questions mostly relate to society and abstract or concrete questions concerning ethics, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Exact sciences are based on and governed by different standards and concepts of truth or ideas about the truth. Regardless of this dichotomy, it is only a dichotomy on the surface. Deep down, the absolute truth is at the equidistance from all these essential points, or all approaches, regardless of their origin (based on purely theoretical thought or conclusion resulting from an experiment), provided that all these approaches have equal merit based on the intrinsic value of any particular endeavor or approach.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Quarks and Waves.
The biggest is equally distant from nothingness as the smallest is. There is equidistance from nothingness to the biggest and the smallest. If we look at an electron, it appears to be a particle and a wave. The notion of a particle as a wave comes from the fact that we cannot measure its position simultaneously when we measure its momentum (velocity). This is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. If we look at a particle, it is a particle; when we do not look at it, it is a wave. The sheer identification of the particle at the moment we look at it does not mean that we, or instruments, changed its nature but just identified it as such. It is not identified and appears to be a wave when we do not look at it. On this level, being a particle or a wave almost does not make a difference because this is “near” the “point” or “near” the passage from the Ultimate Immaterial Reality to our sensory reality. These are the passages from one sphere into another. At this level of infinitesimal values that instruments cannot even register, we face a wavelike particle behavior moving at an extreme speed.

This feature (or what appeared to be a feature to our senses) of a particle may result from its almost infinitesimal size rather than its intrinsic value. To be more precise, a particle's inherent value is independent of our ability to perceive, measure, or comprehend it. We may grasp it to some extent or point, but its intrinsic value may still be beyond our ability and the ability of the technology or instruments we rely on.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE