Michelle Paver Quotes

I'm not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.

I love to watch how scientists' minds work.

Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.

Rather big part of my time is to read scientific journals and to discover what others are doing.

Science is simply a powerful way of understanding what's real and what isn't, what's true and what's not. It can help us determine what works, what doesn't, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it.

Take the situation of a scientist solving a problem, where he has certain data, which call for certain responses. Some of this set of data call for his applying such and such a law, while others call for another law.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

An investigator starts research in a new field with faith, a foggy idea, and a few wild experiments. Eventually the interplay of negative and positive results guides the work. By the time the research is completed, he or she knows how it should have been started and conducted.

There are things done under the name of science which are ridiculous. But there is also stuff done which sounds funny but is really serious.

Science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is you are trying to study. The key is measurement, simple as that.

Scientists are always skeptics.

Just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

The dry academic tomes I wrote very early in my career were earnest reflections of the research I conducted, the analysis I applied and the conclusions I drew. And they had few readers, mostly other academics. I learned along the way and started including more and more stories in my work.

Science is a wonderful way of getting out what's real.

Something my father dearly loved is the scientific method, and it's founded in this element of humility. The idea is that you pursue the truth wherever it goes; you need to evidence, and you can - you see if it's repeatable.

To do good science, you've got to work really, really hard.

But I think you can strip the emotion and the subjectivity away while you focus on doing the science - and that's really important.

Science isn't just for guys in lab coats, you know? It's for anybody who wants to do a good job of understanding and investigating the world.

Doing physics is a lot of fun if you like it.

A good scientist can understand the current state of a field, pick interesting questions where a success will actually lead to useful new knowledge, and push that field further through their work.