Quotes About Experimentalist

What saves the day for physics ... is the fact that the experimentalist does not accept the Cartesian philosophy, which is to say that he treats his apparatus not as a mathematical structure, but as a perceivable object. Even as there are said to be 'no atheists in the trenches', so indeed there are no bifurcationists in the laboratory. All knowledge of the external world begins in the perceptible realm: deny the perceptible object, and nothing external remains.

Fermi, superb experimentalist that he was, contributed valuably to the program of experimental studies, defining with clarity problems that needed to be examined. For him the war work was duty, however, and the eager conviction he found on the Hill puzzled him. "After he had sat in on one of his first conferences here," Oppenheimer recalls, "he turned to me and said, 'I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.' I remember his voice sounded surprised.

Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do, is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.