Quotes About Observation

There are two kinds of observers in science: splitters and lumpers. I've never been much of a splitter; in my heart of hearts, I'm a lumper.) In

Is it that the eye finds what the mind is seeking?

She just went on eating her apple, shaking her head, and looking us over with that calculating, almost contemptuous, look she has at certain times." "Oh, I know! I know!" said Christine. "I've seen that look so many times!

Hob is not meant to Think. I see and then I Do. I do not put things together to make sense.

Macey watched her buttocks move in her fawn cords as if they were chewing a very sweet caramel.

The most difficult part of being a mother was to observe the mistakes of one's children: the foolish loves, the desperate solitude and alienation, the lack of will, the gullibility, the joyous and naive leaps into the unknown, the ignorance, the panicky choices and the utter determination.

They paint what they see and we paint what we are watching.

Almost simultaneously their eyes alighted on a small opening in the twisted branches of the trees, affording them a direct line of sight to the majestic Verrazzano Bridge. Together the women gazed at the slate-gray metal towers soaring skyward, the steel cables delicately draped from one tower to the other, ascending and descending, the small squares and larger rectangles moving back and forth over the curved roadway.

Place the tip of a stick in a clear brook and you'll see it "bend" underwater because the speed of light is literally slower beneath the surface than it is in air.

If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conflation. And then do as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and many others have done. Choose the miracle of creative competition over an idolatry of cash. They should stand up..

William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

Yale, pointed out that once you let yourself see things this way, lots of things become "musical scores"—although they might never have been intended to be played.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town.

The best surveillance is when everyone suspects that they're being watched all the time. The government then doesn't even have to watch the cameras—they need only let people believe someone might be watching.

When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.

John Coltrane, still playing at top intensity and volume, totally into it. He blew me out so bad I slid down the wall. The guy was still playing his solo. He hadn't stopped. I don't think he ever knew that I was in that room. He never saw that little ofay kid in the corner, you know, but he totally turned my mind to Jell-O at that point and that was my John Coltrane experience.

And there are even more unusual cases in poetry, where the observation that parentheses include content of secondary importance needs to be turned on its head. In a poem, what is within the parentheses is always significant -- often more so than in the surrounding text.

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

Amending the 'data', or rejecting some as erroneous, is a frequent concomitant of scientific discovery, and the crucial 'data' cannot even be obtained until theory tells us what to look for and how and why.

Whenever we observe anything – a scientific instrument or a galaxy or a human being – what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes. In

What if you'd rather not know? You may not like these predictions. Your friends and colleagues may ridicule them. You may try to modify the explanation so that it will not make them, without spoiling its agreement with observations and with other ideas for which you have no good alternatives. You will fail. That is what a good explanation will do for you: it makes it harder for you to fool yourself.

Before 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear-fission (atomic-bomb) explosion; there may never have been one in the history of the universe.

One consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable (though this was not made explicit at first). That is to say, the theory must make predictions which, if the theory were false, could be contradicted by the outcome of some possible observation. Thus, although scientific theories are not derived from experience, they can be tested by experience – by observation or experiment

You perceive and remember that to which you can relate. When you observe something aberrant, your tendency is to build a metaphor to explain what you didn't understand.