#method

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#failure #hypothesis #results #science #scientific-method

Shall we educate ourselves in what is known, and then casting away all we have acquired, turn to ignorance for aid to guide us among the unknown? ↗

— Michael Faraday

#research #education

Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#fact #gaede #hypothesizing #mathematical-physics #prediction

Men are generally right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. What we deny is generally something that lies outside our experience, and about which we can therefore say nothing. ↗

— H. Richard Niebuhr

#method #philosophy #experience

And that was true. As the other world experience faded she found herself left with little that she had not known before; there was nothing really that the stark, simple teaching of the Methodist faith did not cover. She had never heard of the Jesuit who said, "Give me a child until he is seven and after that you may do what you like with him", but she was living proof of his theory's validity." Damask Greenway ↗

— Norah Lofts

#faith #jesuit #methodist #experience

The Scientific Method is a wonderful tool as long as you don't care which way the outcome turns; however, this process fails the second one's perception interferes with the interpretation of data. This is why I don’t take anything in life as an absolute…even if someone can “prove” it “scientifically. ↗

— Cristina Marrero

#humor #proof #science-fiction #scientific-method #life

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#reason #science #science-vs-religion #scientific-method #sense-of-wonder

So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#scientific-method #skepticism #science

You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#investigation #methods #mysteries #sherlock-holmes #trifles

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#choose #down #exact #full #genius