Experimentation Quotes

“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“The San Francisco therapist kept telling me I shouldn’t be terrified of creative experimentation.
“I don’t know what’s going to come out of me,” I told her. “It has to be perfect. It has to be irreproachable in every way.”
“Why?” she said.
“To make up for it,” I said. “To make up for the fact that it’s me.”
― Suzanne Rivecca

“I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“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, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Wisdom is nothing more than confirmed imagination: just because one did not study for his exam does not mean that he should leave it blank.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Doing risk sport had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Most of the time in my work, I begin with the answers, with an idea of the results. I suspect that something is true and then I work toward that suspicion, experimenting, tinkering, until I find what I am looking for. The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has already been asked, trying to make it all matter.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“The critical issues here concern what is right, what is just -- not the balancing of benefits.”
― Carl Cohen

“I ended your experiment. Because you're not a scientist. You're a monster. I'm not leaving any of them at your mercy.”
― Rachel Caine, Fall of Night

“Dr Maturin had many of the virtues required in a medical man... yet he had some faults, and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of inquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Commodore

“When the wounded mouse finally died, I held his little body. I rubbed the top of his head, and I thought of it as a blessing, a baptism. Whenever I fed the mice or weighed them for the lever-press task, I always thought of Jesus in the upper room, washing his disciples' feet. This moment of servitude, of being quite literally brought low, always reminded me that I needed these mice just as much as they needed me. More. What would I know about the brain without them? How could I perform my work, find answers to my questions? The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is, if not holy, then at least sacrosanct. I have never, will never, tell anyone that I sometimes think this way, because I'm aware that the Christians in my life would find it blasphemous and the scientists would find it embarrassing, but the more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“it’s always the patient who has to take the chance when an experiment is necessary. And we can find out nothing without experiment.”
― George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma

“People want to believe these research studies are about something simple that they can relate to like winning a contest. They don’t want to think about why a government would want to experiment on its citizens.

They do it because they can, I said. Because you don’t see us as people.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“Mrs. Pasternack said something else that year that I never forgot. She said," The truth is we don't know what we don't know. We don't even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallways, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That's science, but that's also everything else, isn't it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“To remain with a lover permanently, or at least for any significant period of time, had always seemed to me so limiting, so much like putting up a door, albeit a beautiful, elaborately carven door, between myself and the dark, mysterious entrance to the unknown, the unseen, the unexperienced; a door that closed those things off to me. It gave happiness, in my experience, to remain with a lover over some weeks or months, to explore them, to become comfortable with them, to express myself to the fullest extent that I thought they would accept. Over too long a period, however, I always found myself beginning to yearn for those things I was not receiving; those other forms of happiness that loyalty to one person caused to become inaccessible – to be glimpsed from afar yet always untasted, untouched, unfelt.”
― Yasmine Millett, The Erotic Notebooks

“On the one hand, it is said that the animals are so unlike us that they are not worthy of our consideration. On the other hand, vivisectors claim that animals are so like us that they are essential to research. In these conflicting statements we see a researcher's own confusion as to the genuine nature of his" subjects, "and their nature in relation to this own.”
― Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery

“We had already realized from the disaster on Mars that transplanting Earth ecology wouldn't work. Crops would not grow without specific symbiotic fungi on their roots to extract nutrients, and the exact fungi would not grow without the proper soil composition, which did not exist without certain saprophytic bacteria that had proven resistant to transplantation, each life-form demanding its own billion-year-old niche. But Mars fossils and organic chemicals in interstellar comets showed that the building blocks of life were not unique to Earth. Proteins, amino acids, and carbohydrates existed everywhere. The theory of panspermia was true to a degree.

I had found a grass resembling wheat on our first day on Pax, and with a little plant tissue, a dash of hormone from buds, and some chitin, we soon had artificial seeds to plant. But would it grow? Theory was one thing and farming was another.

Then a few days before the women had died from poisoned fruit, Ramona and Carrie had seen the first shoots,...”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“I meant to ask him, What did you do to me? But it came out as Why would you do this to someone? My mouth said it multiple times. I didn't mean the drug, I meant the experiments. But Smith took it to mean the drug and said he knew it wasn't ready. Why do you do this job, I asked him.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“Science is based on nothing other than what-ifs, and skepticism with regard to the preconceived notions that make up the material world.”
― Fariba Hachtroudi, The Man Who Snapped His Fingers

“Experiments are the fastest and guaranteed way to learn.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“I found it concerning the sleep clinic had prescribed a setting that made me sick and this matched my findings with the CPAP machine that these CPAP and BiPAP prescriptions are highly inaccurate! Approximately 50% of people that are prescribed these treatments abandon them and a poor prescription setting is likely a factor in this. It takes weeks of experimentation to find the correct setting of these machines and sleep clinics trying to do it in one night is just providing many sickened patients with a really bad healthcare experience.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“Experimentation with sleeping supplements is required to find out which ones produce the best response.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“We will not sacrifice our children at the altar of fear.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner

“Every business plan begins with a side of assumptions… Because the assumptions haven’t been proved to be true (they are assumptions, after all) and in fact are often erroneous, the goal of a startup’s early efforts should be to test them as quickly as possible”
― Ries Eric, The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

“He released an immense power here, if only for a moment.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, The Gathering Elements

“All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind”
― Martin H. Fischer