Quotes Tagged "method"

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

A statistically significant finding gives you a clue, suggesting a promising place to focus your research energy. The significance test is the detective, not the judge. <...> If a result is novel and important, other scientists in other laboratories ought to test and retest the phenomenon and its variants, trying to figure out whether the result was a one-time fluke or whether it truly meets the Fisherian standard of “rarely fails.” That’s what scientists call replication; if an effect can’t be replicated, despite repeated trials, science backs apologetically away. The replication process is supposed to be science’s immune system, swarming over newly introduced objects and killing the ones that don’t belong.

A philosopher once said 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results'. Well, they do not. You set up the circumstances, with the same conditions every time, and you cannot predict behind which hole you will see the electron. Yet science goes on in spite of it - although the same conditions do not always produce the same results. <...> What is necessary 'for the very existence of science', and what the characteristics of nature are, are not to be determined by pompous preconditions, they are determined always by the material with which we work, by nature herself. We look, and we see what we find, and we cannot say ahead of time successfully what it is going to look like. <...> If science is to progress, what we need is the ability to experiment, honesty in reporting results - the results must be reported without somebody saying what they would like the results to have been - and finally - an important thing - the intelligence to interpret the results.

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.

The harness of waterfalls is the most economical method known for drawing energy from the sun.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

The deductive method is the mode of using knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of acquiring it.

A lot of male actors are method actors and they become the characters which they both were.

I'm not what you'd call a Method actor.

I'm a method actor as well as a method singer.

There is a method to the madness when it comes to placing everything in your refrigerator.

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

Generally, TED speakers are believers in the scientific method.

Naftali Bennett and I have a method in life: We believe in seizing opportunities.

Antimatter is not a source of energy for us, it's a method of storing energy, compact but inefficient.