Robert Andrews Millikan Quotes

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.

To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.

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

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

Science emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and that the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations.

We must trust to nothing but facts: these are presented to us by nature and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance.

Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory.

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)

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

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

Experimenters are the shock troops of science.

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.

Experiment is the sole source of truth.

In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.

In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared.

Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.

The physicist, in his study of natural phenomena, has two methods of making progress: (1) the method of experiment and observation, and (2) the method of mathematical reasoning. The former is just the collection of selected data; the latter enables one to infer results about experiments that have not been performed. There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success.

Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.