Do experimental work but keep in mind that other investigators in the same field will consider your discoveries as less than one fourth as important as they seem to you.

The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d...

What do you resist examining up close?How can you ground yourself so you feel safe enough to try?

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

That all plants immediately and substantially stem from the element water alone I have learnt from the following experiment. I took an earthern vessel in which I placed two hundred pounds of earth dried in...

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied science; to me it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about...

I took a glass retort, capable of containing eight ounces of water, and distilled fuming spirit of nitre according to the usual method. In the beginning the acid passed over red, then it became colourless,...

The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than...

I really like to experiment. That’s the only way I can work. It’s instinctive.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

Theories might inspire you, but experiments will advance you.

[At the beginning of modern science], a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must...

I have always appreciated those who dare to experiment with materials and proportions.

The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods...

Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new; it alone can give us certainty.

In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast … ‘To physics and metaphysics.’ Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy—truths that...

I do not think the division of the subject into two parts – into applied mathematics and experimental physics a good one, for natural philosophy without experiment is merely mathematical exercise, while experiment without mathematics...

If it was the warmth of the sun, and not its light, that produced this operation, it would follow, that, by warming the water near the fire about as much as it would have been...