"By observation, facts are distinctly and minutely impressed in the mind; by analogy, similar facts are connected ; by experiment, new facts are discovered ; and, in the progression of knowledge, observation, guided by analogy, leads to experiment, and analogy, confirmed by experiment, becomes scientific truth." (Sir Humphry Davy)
"For although it is certainly true that quantitative measurements are of great importance, it is a grave error to suppose that the whole of experimental physics can be brought under this heading. We can start measuring only when we know what to measure: qualitative observation has to precede quantitative measurement, and by making experimental arrangements for quantitative measurements we may even eliminate the possibility of new phenomena appearing." (Heinrich B G Casimir)
"I am of the opinion that the task of the theory consists in constructing a picture of the external world that exists purely internally and must be our guiding star in all thought and experiment." (Ludwig E Boltzmann)
"If you can’t have an experiment, do the best you can with whatever data you can gather, but do be very skeptical of historical data and subject them to all the logical tests you can think of." (Robert Hooke)
"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." (Ernest Rutherford)
"In the study of Nature conjecture must be entirely put aside, and vague hypothesis carefully guarded against. The study of Nature begins with facts, ascends to laws, and raises itself, as far as the limits of man’s intellect will permit, to the knowledge of causes, by the threefold means of observation, experiment and logical deduction." (Jean Baptiste-Andre Dumas)
"Let the imagination go, guiding it by judgment and principle but holding it in and directing it by experiment." (Michael Faraday)
"Natural Philosophy consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature, and reducing them, as far as may be, to general Rules or Laws - establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thence deducing the causes and effects of things." (Isaac Newton, "A Scheme for Establishing the Royal Society")
"Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; is analogy, - the relation of resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed, either for popular use, or for new speculative improvements. (Sir Humphry Davy)
"Nothing destroys the powers of general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science." (Herbert G Wells)
"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency." (Michael Faraday)
"Science is a game - but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives [..] If a man cuts a picture carefully into 1000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord. He has not only set the problem but also has devised the rules of the game - but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to deduce. The experiment is the tempered blade which you wield with success against the spirits of darkness - or which defeats you shamefully. The uncertainty is how many of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how many apparently are caused by your own mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from its limitations." (Erwin Schrödinger)
"Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness." (Thomas Carlyle)
"Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs." (Antoine Lavoisier)
"The art of observation and that of experimentation are very distinct. In the first case, the fact may either proceed from logical reasons or be mere good fortune; it is sufficient to have some penetration and a sense of truth in order to profit by it. But the art of experimentation leads from the first to the last link of the chain, without hesitation and without a blank, making successive use of Reason, which suggests an alternative, and of Experience, which decides on it, until, starting from a faint glimmer, the full blaze of light is reached." (Jean Baptiste-Andre Dumas)
"The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment." (Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle)
"The experiment is the most powerful and most reliable lever enabling us to extract secrets from nature. [...] The experiment must constitute the final judgment as to whether a hypothesis should be retained or be discarded." (Wilhelm Röntgen)
"The experiment serves two purposes, often independent one from the other: it allows the observation of new facts, hitherto either unsuspected, or not yet well defined; and it determines whether a working hypothesis fits the world of observable facts." (René J Dubos)
"The first things I found out were that all mathematical reasoning is diagrammatic and that all necessary reasoning is mathematical reasoning, no matter how simple it may be. By diagrammatic reasoning, I mean reasoning which constructs a diagram according to a precept expressed in general terms, performs experiments upon this diagram, notes their results, assures itself that similar experiments performed upon any diagram constructed according to the same precept would have the same results, and expresses this in general terms. This was a discovery of no little importance, showing, as it does, that all knowledge without exception comes from observation." (Charles S Peirce)
"The interpreter of the wonders of nature is experience. It never misleads us, only our grasp can do it with us. Until we can establish a general rule, we must accept the help of experience. Although nature begins with the cause, and with the experiment, we must do it inversely, we must discover the cause with experiments." (Leonardo da Vinci)
"The only use of an hypothesis is, that it should lead to experiments; that it should be a guide to facts. In this application, conjectures are always of use. The destruction of an error hardly ever takes place without the discovery of truth. [...] Hypothesis should be considered merely an intellectual instrument of discovery, which at any time may be relinquished for a better instrument. It should never be spoken of as truth; its highest praise is verisimility. Knowledge can only be acquired by the senses; nature has an archetype in the human imagination; her empire is given only to industry and action, guided and governed by experience." (Sir Humphry Davy)
"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)
"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." (Godfrey H Hardy)
"There is no higher or lower knowledge, but one only, flowing out of experimentation." (Leonardo da Vinci)
"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." (Nikola Tesla)
"We are convinced that exactitude in experiments is less the outcome of faithful observation of the divisions of an instrument than of exactitude of method." (Joseph L Gay-Lussac)
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