"We are all aware, although we rarely think about it, that all human forethought depends on our recognizing or putting some kind of order into the world.
As much as bookkeeping, government, and doing the weekend shopping,... science is an activity of putting order into our experience...
Science is to get rid of angels, blue fairies, and other agents whose intervention would reduce the explanation of physical events to other than physical terms...
We must use science as it is, and that is an assembly of observations so ordered that they tell us what we may expect in the future.
Science is not only rational; it is also empirical. Science is experiment, that is orderly and reasoned activity.
The essence of experiment and of all science is, that it is active. It does not watch the world, it tackles it."
Bronowski J. (1950, 1978), The Common Sense of Science, Chap. 7, Cambridge MA: Harvard UP
"Scientific discovery is never entirely accidental. It holds an element of surprise, to be sure, the effective surprise that changes a person's perception of nature.
But the best scientists know how to surprise themselves purposely. They master the widest range of mental tools (including, but not limited to, game playing,
universal thinking, identification with subject matter, intuition, and pattern recognition) and identify deficiencies or inconsistences in their understanding of the world.
Finally, they are clever enough to interpret their observations in such a way as to change the perceptions of other scientists, as well. As Albert Szent-Gyorgyi put it,
`Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.'"
Root-Bernstein R. S. (1988) Setting the Stage for Discovery.The Sciences. May/June.
The above are Courtesy of Thomas K. Rehfeldt
"An isolated sensation teaches us nothing, for it does not amount to an observation. Observation is a putting together of several results of sensation which are or
are supposed to be connected with each other according to the law of causality, so that some represent causes and others their effects."
T. N. Thiele, Theory of Observations, London: Cahales and Edwin Layton, 1903 p. 2
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: The Revolutionists' Handbook.
Quotations. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 7:1, p. 265-284
Quotations. … Rasch Measurement Transactions, 1993, 7:1, 265-284
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