Johannes P. Muller Quotes

One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn't matter where you were born, and it doesn't matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you'll get the same result.

Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable.

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

Only by observing this condition would the results of our work be regarded as fully conclusive and as having elucidated the normal course of the phenomena.

Okay, are you really 'experimenting'? How do you know if you're really experimenting? You're working on it methodically and you're publishing the results! It's not an experiment if you don't publish the results in some verifiable and falsifiable form, okay?

The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry — is not even a ”subject " — but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.

The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.

Scientific method, although in its more refined forms it may seem complicated, is in essence remarkably simply. It consists in observing such facts as will enable the observer to discover general laws governing facts of the kind in question. The two stages, first of observation, and second of inference to a law, are both essential, and each is susceptible of almost indefinite refinement. (1931)

Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.

Experiment is fundamentally only induced observation.

Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.

The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

As to science, we may well define it for our purpose as "methodical thinking directed toward finding regulative connections between our sensual experiences".

Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.

An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.

Experiment is the mother of knowledge.

The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.

The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers; it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is a peculiarity of the professional scientist.

Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.