"The first business of a man of science is to proclaim the truth as he finds it, and let the world adjust itself as best it can to the new knowledge." (Percy W Bridgman, [Letter to R. M. Hunter] 1919)
"It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention." (Percy W Bridgman, "The Logic of Modern Physics", 1927)
"[...] the fact has always been for the physicist the one ultimate thing from which there is no appeal, and in the face of which the only possible attitude is a humility almost religious." (Percy W Bridgman, "The Logic of Modern Physics", 1927)
"Every new theory as it arises believes in the flush of youth that it has the long sought goal; it sees no limits to its applicability, and believes that at last it is the fortunate theory to achieve the 'right' answer." (Percy W Bridgman, "The Nature of Physical Theory", 1931)
"In this respect mathematics fails to reproduce with complete fidelity the obvious fact that experience is not composed of static bits, but is a string of activity, or the fact that the use of language is an activity, and the total meanings of terms are determined by the matrix in which they are embedded." (Percy W Bridgman, "the Nature of Physical Theory", 1931)
"We may summarize [...] the fundamental characteristics and limitations of mathematics as follows: mathematics is ultimately an experimental science, for freedom from contradiction cannot be proved, but only postulated and checked by observation, and similarly existence can only be postulated and checked by observation. Furthermore, mathematics requires the fundamental device of all thought, of analyzing experience into static bits with static meanings." (Percy W Bridgman, "the Nature of Physical Theory", 1931)
"But in no case is there any question of time flowing backward, and in fact the concept of backward flow of time seems absolutely meaningless. […] If it were found that the entropy of the universe were decreasing, would one say that time was flowing backward, or would one say that it was a law of nature that entropy decreases with time?" (Percy W Bridgman, "Reflections of a Physicist", 1950)
"It seems to me that there is a good deal of ballyhoo about scientific method. I venture to think that the people who talk most about it are the people who do least about it. Scientific method is what working scientists do, not what other people or even they themselves may say about it. No working scientist, when he plans an experiment in the laboratory, asks himself whether he is being properly scientific, nor is he interested in whatever method he may be using as method." (Percy W Bridgman, "Reflections of a Physicist", 1950)
"Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists." (Percy W Bridgman, "Reflections of a Physicist", 1950)
"The process that I want to call scientific is a process that involves the continual apprehension of meaning, the constant appraisal of significance accompanied by a running act of checking to be sure that I am doing what I want to do, and of judging correctness or incorrectness. This checking and judging and accepting, that together constitute understanding, are done by me and can be done for me by no one else. They are as private as my toothache, and without them science is dead." (Percy W Bridgman, "Reflections of a Physicist", 1950)
"We have here no esoteric theory of the ultimate nature of concepts, nor a philosophical championing of the primacy of the 'operation'. We have merely a pragmatic matter, namely that we have observed after much experience that if we want to do certain kinds of things with our concepts, our concepts had better be constructed in certain ways. In fact one can see that the situation here is no different from what we always find when we push our analysis to the limit; operations are not ultimately sharp or irreducible any more than any other sort of creature. We always run into a haze eventually, and all our concepts are describable only in spiralling approximation." (Percy W Bridgman, "Reflections of a Physicist", 1950)
"By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so." (Percy W Bridgman, "Quo Vadis", 1958)
"In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations." (Percy W. Bridgman, "The Logic of Modern Physics", 1960)
"Science is intelligence in action with no holds barred." (Percy W Bridgman)
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