Quotes About Experiment

My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.

One not-to-be-mentioned major said they would sign me if I worked with a team of songwriters to help me finish songs, ha! Of course, in hindsight, I should've done it just to see what that would have been like.

I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.

In 'Demon's Souls,' we tried to implement some features in a kind of experimental way, not being sure whether or not it would be popular, but we did it anyway so that we could see how people reacted.

There are things done under the name of science which are ridiculous. But there is also stuff done which sounds funny but is really serious.

I often feel like a nutty professor, like I'm going to try this experiment and see if it works. My hypothesis is, people in the West can absorb African women stories without any shaken or stirred mixer. It can come directly from the source.

We had 83 different space research projects on my last space flight in '98, and they covered the whole gamut.

Sound is complex; there are many countervailing influences. It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens.

Sometimes things need shaking up. You've got to test the limits.

To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.

Charlatan" was held to be a synonym for empirick. The word "empiric" designated someone who relied on experiment and experience to ascertain what was correct. In other words, trial and error and tinkering. That was held to be inferior—professionally, socially, and intellectually. It is still not considered to be very "intelligent.

the researcher has the incentive to select the experiment that corresponds to what he was looking for, hiding the failed attempts.

He can also formulate a hypothesis after the results of the experiment—thus fitting the hypothesis to the experiment.

This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making testable predictions. The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: They suggest a problem, and run a test.

We can, however, assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under certain conditions, and keep a tally of what we see.

Even trial and error are a form of barbell.

Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. if every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution - so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.

exposure is more important than knowledge;

But I also buy the opposite argument that regulating street signs does not seem to reduce risks; drivers become more placid. Experiments show that alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control to the system (again, lack of overcompensation). Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external regulator—fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than using regulated crossings.

The experiment, so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where

But as for Rappaccini, it is said of him — and I, who know the man well, can answer for its truth — that he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.

Many of the so-called American characteristics,' a chronicler of the [WW2 University of Minnesota starvation] experiment wrote, '—abounding energy, generosity, optimism—become intelligible as the expected behavior response of a well-fed people.

German scientists had perfected the shaped charges that could bring about these collisions at very high temperatures. Diebner and his team began putting together a series of experiments that would squeeze deuterium atoms together through the use of explosive shock waves inside a hollow silver ball, their goal being to trigger a fusion reaction—and create a bomb.

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.