#experiments

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#education #experiments #growth #life #mistakes

These bizarre examples attempt to prove one conceptual point or another by deliberately reducing all but one underappreciated feature of some phenomenon to zero, so that what really counts can shine through. The twin earth example sets internal similarity to a maximum (you are whisked off to Twin Earth without being given a chance to register this huge shift) so that external context can be demonstrated to be responsible for whatever our intuition tells us. ↗

— Daniel Dennett

#experience

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture. ↗

— Hannes Alfven

#astray #completely #conjecture #contact #enterprise

We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience, then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them. ↗

— Amar Bose

#angles #arriving #audience #back #boston

Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.' ↗

— Philip Zimbardo

#aggression #came #discussions #experiments #first

If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#achievements #call #claim #experiments #failures

Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common. ↗

— Denis Diderot

#common #creative #diligent #exact #experiments

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems. ↗

— Wietse Venema

#controlled #deal #equipment #experiments #failures

In our gliding experiments we had had a number of experiences in which we had landed upon one wing, but the crushing of the wing had absorbed the shock, so that we were not uneasy about the motor in case of a landing of that kind. ↗

— Orville Wright

#case #crushing #experiences #experiments #gliding

In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort. ↗

— William Gilbert

#common #conjectures #demonstrated #discovery #experiments