Quotes About Observation

Driving around the West, I was like an illiterate man staring into a book; he doesn't understand what exactly he's seeing, but he damn sure knows it's important

Nothing about the practice of modern science is obvious to someone who has never seen it done.

The real difference between Aristarchus and today's astronomers and physicists is not that his observational data were in error, but that he never tried to judge the uncertainty in them, or even acknowledged that they might be imperfect.

I don't at all mean to say that the early Greeks decided to write poetically in order to avoid the need to validate their theories. They felt no such need. Today we test our speculations about nature by using proposed theories to draw more or less precise conclusions that can be tested by observation. This did not occur to the early Greeks, or to many of their successors, for a very simple reason: they had never seen it done.

La diferencia fundamental entre la ciencia de Aristarco y la nuestra no son los errores de sus observaciones. Algunos errores esporádicos graves siguen afectando a la observación astronómica y la física experimental[...]. La verdadera diferencia entre Aristarco y los astrónomos y físicos de la actualidad no es que los datos de sus observaciones fueran erróneos, sino que jamás los puso en duda, y ni siquiera reconoció que pudieran ser imperfectos.

But every once in a while someone finds a way of explaining some phenomenon that fits so well and clarifies so much that it gives the finder intense satisfaction, especially when the new understanding is quantitative, and observation bears it out in detail. Imagine

The pre-Socratic Xenophanes famously commented, "Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair," and remarked, "But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.

Even before the start of history, the sky must have been commonly used as a compass, a clock, and a calendar. It could not have been difficult to notice that the Sun rises every morning in more or less the same direction, that during the day one can tell how much time there is before night from the height of the Sun in the sky, and that hot weather will follow the time of year when the day lasts longest.

I think God's going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.

I went into this bar and sat down next to a pretty girl. She looked at me and said, "Hey, you have two different colored socks on." I said, "Yeah, I know, but to me they're the same because I go by thickness."

When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving.

Every now and then I like to lean out my window, look up and smile for a satellite picture.

They say the sun never sets over the British Empire, but it rises every morning. The sky must get awfully crowded.

If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happens if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?

The other night I was lying in bed, looking up at the stars, and I wondered, 'Where the hell is my roof?

Light travels faster than sound. Isn't that why people appear bright before you hear them speak?

It doesn't matter what temperature a room is, it's always room temperature.

Why is a carrot more orange than an orange?

Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates... When I pointed it out to my roommate, he said, "Do I know you?

What do little birdies see when they get knocked unconscious?

How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask if I'm leaving.