"[…] there is a God precisely because Nature itself, even in chaos, cannot proceed except in an orderly and regular manner." (Immanuel Kant) "There is no such thing as chaos, it tacitly asserts, in the sidereal world or outside of it. For chaos is the negation of law, and law is the expression of the will of God." (Agnes M Clerke, "Problems in Astrophysics", 1903)
"[...] as for physics, it has developed remarkably as a precision science, in such a way that we can justifiably claim that the majority of all the greatest discoveries in physics are very largely based on the high degree of accuracy which can now be obtained in measurements made during the study of physical phenomena. [... Accuracy of measurement] is the very root, the essential condition, of our penetration deeper into the laws of physics - our only way to new discoveries." (K Bernhard Hasselberg, [Nobel Lecture] 1907)
"In fact, we only attain laws by violating nature, by isolating more or less artificially a phenomenon from the whole, by checking those influences which would have falsified the observation. Thus the law cannot directly express reality. The phenomenon as it is envisaged by it, the ‘pure’ phenomenon, is rarely observed without our intervention, and even with this it remains imperfect, disturbed by accessory phenomena. […] Doubtless, if nature were not ordered, if it did not present us with similar objects, capable of furnishing generalized concepts, we could not formulate laws." (Emile Meyerson, "Identity and Reality", 1908)
"An experiment is an observation that can be repeated, isolated and varied. The more frequently you can repeat an observation, the more likely are you to see clearly what is there and to describe accurately what you have seen. The more strictly you can isolate an observation, the easier does your task of observation become, and the less danger is there of your being led astray by irrelevant circumstances, or of placing emphasis on the wrong point. The more widely you can vary an observation, the more clearly will be the uniformity of experience stand out, and the better is your chance of discovering laws." (Edward B Titchener, "A Text-Book of Psychology", 1909)
"It is well to notice in this connection [the mutual relations between the results of counting and measuring] that a natural law, in the statement of which measurable magnitudes occur, can only be understood to hold in nature with a certain degree of approximation; indeed natural laws as a rule are not proof against sufficient refinement of the measuring tools." (Luitzen E J Brouwer, "Intuitionism and Formalism", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 20, 1913)
"The scheme of laws of nature so largely due to Newton is merely one of an infinite number of conceivable rational schemes for helping us master and make experience; it is commode, convenient; but perhaps another may be vastly more advantageous. The old conception of true has been revised. The first expression of the new idea occurs on the title page of John Bolyai's marvelous Science Absolute of Space, in the phrase 'haud unquam a priori decidenda'." (George B Halsted, 1913)
"[…] as the sciences have developed further, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations." (William James, "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking", 1914)
"Scientific laws, when we have reason to think them accurate, are different in form from the common-sense rules which have exceptions: they are always, at least in physics, either differential equations, or statistical averages." (Bertrand A Russell, "The Analysis of Matter", 1927)
"The mystery that clings to numbers, the magic of numbers, may spring from this very fact, that the intellect, in the form of the number series, creates an infinite manifold of well distinguishable individuals. Even we enlightened scientists can still feel it e.g. in the impenetrable law of the distribution of prime numbers." (Hermann Weyl, "Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science", 1927)
"Science is the attempt to discover, by means of observation, and reasoning based upon it, first, particular facts about the world, and then laws connecting facts with one another and (in fortunate cases) making it possible to predict future occurrences." (Bertrand Russell, "Religion and Science, Grounds of Conflict", 1935)
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