Max Weber Quotes

Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.

The advantage of the analytical approach is that it is widely applicable, and it can provide a considerable amount of quantitative information even with a relatively poor resolving power.

My three years at the NIH were critical in my scientific education. I learned an immense amount about the research process: developing assays, purifying macromolecules, documenting a discovery by many approaches, and writing clear manuscripts describing what is known and what remains to be investigated.

My research process doesn't vary much. I do a little reading to establish a timeline and decide how I'm going to approach the story.

No observational problem will not be solved by more data.

No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.

Do not speculate; get data and calculate.

That's really part of being a grounded theory researcher - putting names to concepts and experiences that people have.

If you are funding researchers to look primarily for pathology, not surprisingly, that is what they are going to find and report on.

Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.

If we just focus on stats, we're gonna eventually not have them.

Research in the natural sciences operates in successive approximations. We are glad to be able to offer many good problems for research by generations to come.

There's been the emergence of a philosophy that big data is all you need. We would suggest that, actually, numbers don't speak for themselves.

Numbers can't speak for themselves, and data sets - no matter their scale - are still objects of human design.

The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data.

Methodology is intuition reconstructed in tranquility.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

About 85 per cent of my "thinking" time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs... When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so.

The computer age has arrived, and it influences everything: analysis, preparation, information. Now a different talent is required - the ability to synthesize ideas.

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

Experimentalists never know when their work is finished.

In science it is not enough to think of an important problem on which to work. It is also necessary to know the means which could be used to investigate the problem.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

I was just kind of doing the math.