— Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988), QED, Penguin Books, 1990, 8.
It seems to me that
there is a great 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.
— W. Bridgman (1882 – 1961), Reflections of
a Physicist, 1949.
Full many a flower
is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
— Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771) Elegy in a Country
Churchyard.
The story is told
in the University of Paris that the philosophers there once disputed among themselves
as to the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth. It was argued that the number could
not be a multiple of three, because that would imply disrespect to the Trinity;
nor could it be a multiple of seven, for God created the World in six days and rested
upon the seventh. Neither the authority or Aristotle nor the ingenuity of the schoolmen
could resolve the problem, but it was finally settled by a young man, who opened
the mouth of a horse, and counted the teeth. The doctors of the University were
not convinced by this novel and unintellectual procedure; but the opening of the
horse’s mouth marks the birth of the scientific method.
— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology
in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.
Aristotle maintained
that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred
to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.
— Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), The Impact
of Science on Society, 1952.
To the Greeks of Aristotle’s
time, and for two thousand years afterward, scientific truth was best discovered
and expressed by deducing the nature of things from a set of self-evident premises,
which accounts for Aristotle’s believing that women have fewer teeth than men, and
that babies are healthier if conceived when the wind is in the north. Aristotle
was twice married but so far as we know, it did not occur to him to ask either of
his wives if he could count her teeth. As for his obstetric opinions, we are safe
in assuming he used no questionnaires and hid behind no curtains. Such acts would
have seemed to him both vulgar and unnecessary, for that was not the way to ascertain
the truth of things. The language of deductive logic proved a surer road.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death,
Penguin Books, 1986.
The long chains of
simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the
conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations had led me to imagine that all
things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the
same way and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach,
or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only that we abstain from accepting
the false for the true and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for
the deduction of one truth from another.
— René Descartes (1596 – 1650), Discourse
on Method, 16.
Hypotheses lead persons
to try a variety of experiments, in order to ascertain [test] them. In these experiments
new facts generally arise. These new facts serve to correct the hypothesis which
gave occasion to them. The theory thus corrected serves to discover more new facts,
which … bring the theory still nearer the truth.
— Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804), The History
and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, 1767, 421.
One is at liberty
to suppose that somewhere along the way the scientist has intuitively abstracted
rules of the game for himself, but there is little reason to believe it. Though
many scientists talk easily and well about particular individual hypotheses that
underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen
at characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems
and methods.
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, second edition, 1970, 47.
According to [Popper],
it is the task of the scientist, guided by the knowledge of his time, to propose
a theory that takes into account what is known, but which, over and above this,
forecasts what future experiments and observations should show. It is only if a
theory submits itself to empirical tests that one can call it scientific. If such
an empirical test goes against the theory, then the theory has been disproved. If
it agrees with the forecasts of the theory, then it becomes the task of the theorist
to go on making more and more forecasts, to go on sticking his neck out. A theory
is scientific only as long as it lives dangerously. If it is not at risk, it is
not part of science.
— Sir Hermann Bondi, Setting the Scene.
No scientific theory
is a collection of facts. It will not even do to call a theory true or false in
the simple sense in which every fact is either so or not so.
— Jacob Bronowski (1908 – 1974), Science and
Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.
In parts of biology
— the study of heredity, for example — the first universally received paradigms
are still more recent; and it remains an open question what parts of social science
have yet acquired such paradigms at all. History suggests the road to a firm research
consensus is extraordinarily arduous.
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, second edition, 1970, 15.
Men who have excessive
faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill-prepared for making discoveries;
they also make very poor observations.
— Claude Bernard (1813 – 1878).
It is the greatest
discovery in method which science has made that the apparently trivial, the merely
curious, may be clues to an understanding of the deepest principles of nature.
— Sir George Paget Thomson (1892 – 1975).
Science cannot discover
truth, but it is an excellent means of discovering error. The residuum left over
after errors are eliminated is usually called scientific truth.
— Kenneth Boulding.
It remains true that,
on the large lines, Richelieu could afford to be sincere, Bismarck could not; and
to be compelled to insincerity in the large lines is a heavy burden, a large tax
upon energy.
— Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953), ‘Richelieu and Bismarck’ in Stories Essays and Poems, Everyman Library
948, 1957, 197.
The main difference
of modern scientific research from that of the Middle Ages, the secret of its immense
successes, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every fruitful experiment
is published, every new discovery of relationship explained.
— H. G. Wells (1866 – 1946), quoted in Aubrey’s
Brief Lives, Penguin Books, 69.
The great tragedy
of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Henry Huxley, (1825 – 1895), Biogenesis
and Abiogenesis; Collected Essays viii.
Scientists who are
more interested in experiments than in ideas are liable to quote Huxley’s remark
about ‘the tragedy of a beautiful theory destroyed by one little fact’. I found
it of enormous interest, mixed rather often with alarm and despondency, to watch
over a decade clonal selection theory being destroyed several times by what appeared
to be incompatible facts. Yet, over the same years, virtually every new discovery
of general significance made clonal selection seem more and more reasonable. The
little ‘hard fact’ in biology nearly always includes someone’s interpretation and
interpretations have a tendency to change. No single experiment ever established
one biological generalisation or refuted another. Immunology is perhaps one of the
most soft-edged of the biological sciences.
— Sir Macfarlane Burnet, (1899 – 1984), Walter
and Eliza Hall Institute 1915 – 1965, Melbourne University Press, 1971.
It is a good morning
exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast.
It keeps him young.
— Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, Methuen
University Paperback, 1967, 8.
… sometimes I’ve believed
as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
— The White Queen, in Lewis Carroll (Reverend Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Play is a means by
which young animals are trained for the responsibilities and conflicts of adult
life. The higher the animal the longer is the period of play and the more keenly
it is enjoyed. There is something of Peter Pan in all of us and in good scientists
more than most.
— Sir Macfarlane Burnet, (1899 – 1984), Walter
and Eliza Hall Institute 1915 – 1965, Melbourne University Press, 1971.
Preconceived ideas
are like searchlights which illumine the path of the experimenter and serve him
as a guide to interrogate nature. They become a danger only if he transforms them
into fixed ideas — this is why I should like to see these profound words inscribed
on the threshold of all the temples of science: ‘The greatest derangement of the
mind is to believe something because one wishes it to be so …’
— Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895), quoted by Robert S. de Ropp in The New Prometheans, 1972, 80.
The outcome of any
serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one question
grew before.
— Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929), The Place
of Science in Modern Civilization.
At first useless,
these facts had to remain unperceived until the moment when the needs and progress
of science provoked us to discover them.
— Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire (1772 – 1844), quoted by Stephen Jay Gould (1941 –
2002) in ‘How does a panda fit?’ in An Urchin
in the Storm, Penguin, 1987.
… It shall and may
be lawful for the said Society by their proper officers, at all times, whether in
peace or war, to correspond with learned Societies, as well as individual learned
men, of any nation or country
— Charter of the American Philosophical Society,
1780.
The practical uses
of any science or branch of knowledge are undoubtedly of the highest importance;
and there is hardly any man who may not gain some positive advantage in his worldly
wealth and comforts, by increasing his stock of information.
— Henry Lord Brougham (1778 – 1868), quoted New
Scientist, 22 September, 1977, 734.
I came into the story
with no humanitarian motives. I wanted to find out what happened to a man when one
made him more acid or more alkaline. The chemists told me that my body was a system
of negatively charged colloids. They also told me that when one makes such a system
more alkaline the electric charge on the colloids increases, and that when one makes
it more acid it diminishes. But they apparently never wondered what a colloidal
system felt like when one diminished its charge.
One might, of course,
have tried experiments on a rabbit first, and some work had been done along those
lines; but it is difficult to be sure how a rabbit feels at any time…most rabbits
get frightened, and to do the sort of things to a dog that one does to the average
medical student requires a licence signed in triplicate by two archbishops, as far
as I can remember.
— John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892 – 1964) ‘On Being One’s Own Rabbit’, Possible Worlds, 1927.
… holding them by
the back of the neck, [I] pass them through the water into the vessel which contains
the air. If I expect that the mouse will live a considerable time, I take care to
put into the vessel something on which it may conveniently sit, out of the reach
of the water. If the air be good, the mouse will soon be perfectly at its ease,
having suffered nothing by its passing through the water. If the air be supposed
to be noxious, it will be proper (if the operator be desirous of preserving the
mice for farther use) to keep hold of their tails, that they may be withdrawn as
soon as they begin to show signs of uneasiness…
— Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804), Experiments
and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2nd edition, 1775.
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