Selected experimentation quotes

1. Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.

2. I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

3. As we have seen, bread, and especially dry bread, evokes secretion of considerably larger quantities of saliva than meat.

4. Finally, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the course of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts.

5. In the case of the stomach, however, the nerves of the glandular cells were always severed when constructing an artificially isolated pouch and this, naturally, affected the normal work of the stomach.

6. Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

7. Development of Western Science is based on two great achievements - the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

8. We often discover what WILL do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

9. We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

10. It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it came back to hit you.

11. Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

12. Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

13. When I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two-and didn't like it-and didn't inhale and never tried inhaling again.

14. If there was a trick to [recipe or ingredient], and I'm not saying there is. But if there was...

15. My neighbors thought I was insane because I was standing there with a stopwatch grilling ice cubes for three days.

16. I constructed a machine that I imagined was capable of taking me as high as I wanted to go. I launched myself into the air from the edge of a cliff. But I had miscalculated, and I crashed into the valley below. I returned to my room, quite rumpled but not discouraged. I took some beef marrow and slathered it all over my body, which was bruised from head to toe. I fortified my courage with a bottle of cordial and went back for my machine.

17. I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter.

18. The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach. We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young. Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you. May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking!

19. After remaking the animal's organism in accordance with our design, which naturally caused more or less damage to the experimental animal, we had to find a modus vivendi for it that would ensure an absolutely normal and long life.

20. In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is. :-)

21. He who would go in for novel experiments must begin with himself.

22. In the early days of the DCC I preferred to let the proponents do their thing and then see how it all worked out in the end. Now we are pretty close to the end.

23. My drug period was between the age of 17 and 18. That was a time when I was experimenting with a lot of things, I was experimenting with sleep deprivation, fasting. The longest fast I ever did was 12 days. You go that long without food and you hallucinate. I would take this powder made out of guarana seed, my friend Mary would bake it up like cocoa in muffins and leave them on my doorstep. My drinking period was when I was 13, 14. Drugs fascinated me for a short period of time but not any more. A glass of wine puts me in a weird enough state.

24. All experiments in psychology are not of this [cargo cult] type, however. For example there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on - with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using - not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.

25. Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

26. A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions - as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

27. Youth is wholly experimental.

28. During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. ... I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament. . . . Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.