Cameron’s experiments weren’t working out quite as he expected … He couldn’t find a way of replacing them with new memories. His patients were completely free of their past and of all the emotions that went with it. ibid.
The CIA were terrified that the Russians might also be working to produce a programmed assassin. They decided to continue funding Dr Cameron; whether he was creating healthy human beings or not was now irrelevant. The prefect assassin would be programmed for one simple task, and the fewer memories and emotions involved the better. ibid.
But the idea that it was necessary to manipulate the inner feelings of the American population in the interests of fighting the Cold War now began to take root in Washington. Above all in the CIA who were going to take it much further. They were concerned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychological methods to actually alter the memories and feelings of people. The aim being to produce more controllable citizens. It was known as brainwashing. Psychologists in the CIA were convinced that really might be possible and that they should try to do it themselves. In the late fifties the CIA poured millions of dollars into the psychology departments across America. They were secretly funding experiments on how to alter and control the inner drives of human beings. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, BBC 2002
In fact Cameron’s experiments were a complete disaster. All he managed to produce were dozens of individuals with memory loss, and the ability to repeat the phrase, I am at ease with myself. And it was not an isolated case. Almost all the experiments the CIA funded were equally unsuccessful. Despite their ambitions, American psychologists were beginning to find out how difficult it was to understand and control the inner workings of the human mind. ibid.
The true method of knowledge is experiment. William Blake
They want to experiment on us. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine s6e9: Statistical Probabilities, Jack
These experiments were meticulous and they were brutal. Star Trek: Voyager s5e26: Equinox I, Janeway to captain
Michael Faraday, the father of electricity ... He conducted most of his experiments into magnetism and electricity here at the Royal Institution. And his practical demonstrations to a distinguished audience of fellow scientists and enthusiastic VIPs were the talk of the town. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e7: Bright Sparks, Discovery 2007
A most venomous thing in the making of sciences; for whoever has fixed on his cause, before he has experimented, can hardly avoid fitting his experiment to his own cause ... rather than the cause to the truth of the experiment itself. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 1667
A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Erwin Schrodinger
Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. David Cronenberg
I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment. Orson Welles
For each of us who appear to have had a successful experiment, there are many to whom their own experiments seem barren and negative. Melvin Calvin
One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn’t matter where you were born, and it doesn’t matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been, if you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you’ll get the same result. Neil deGrasse Tyson
It’s worth noting that invoking God as the entity who set our universe in motion isn’t contradicted by the data. Of course, scientists would say the supreme being hypothesis is faith, and outside the realm of science – that it’s not amenable to experiment. But we currently have the same problem with the notion of parallel universes. Seth Shostak
The ideas of science germinate in a matrix of established knowledge gained by experiment; they are not lonesome thoughts, born in a rarefied realm where no researcher has ever gone before. Seth Shostak
Since the Renaissance, a concept called ‘progress’ has been baked into our society. Progress – founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That’s what separates us from the beasts. Seth Shostak
It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment. Thomas Malthus
An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. Max Planck
Experiment is fundamentally only induced observation. Claude Bernard
Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied science; to me it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature. If it is likely to yield such knowledge, it is, in my opinion, good fundamental research; and this is more important than whether the motivation is purely aesthetic satisfaction on the part of the experimenter on the one hand or the improvement of the stability of a high-power transistor on the other. William B Shockley
A fool ... is a man who never tried an experiment in his life. Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802
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. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
In our experiments we have measured that a single photon can tunnel across a tunnel barrier at one point seven times the speed of light. Professor Raymond Chiao, University of California
There are two small islets off the Croatian coast called Pod Kopiste and Pod Mrcaru. In 1971 a population of common Mediterranean lizards, Podarcis sicula, which mainly eat insects, was present on Pod Kopiste but there were none on Pod Mrcaru. In that year experimenters transported five pairs of Padarcis sicula from Pod Kopiste and released them on Pod Mrcaru ... Herrel and his colleagues made observations on the descendants of the transported lizards and compared them with lizards living on the original ancestral island. There were marked differences. Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth pp113-114
The Lenski experiments are distressing to creationists, and for a very good reason. They are a beautiful demonstration of evolution in action ... E. coli is a common bacterium ... These twelve flasks founded twelve lines of evolution that we destined to be kept separate from one another for two decades and counting ... Each tribe had a new flask every day ... This means about 7,000 'flask generations' and 45,000 bacterial generations ... different tribes developed different sets of mutation. ibid. pp117-121
The more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa ... Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time p61
If electrons are sent through the slits one at a time, one would expect each to pass through one slit of the other, and so behave just as if the slit it passed through were the only one there – giving a uniform distribution on the screen. In reality, however, even when the electrons are sent one at a time, the fringes still appear. Each electron, therefore, must be passing through both slits at the same time! ibid. p65
A young Albert Einstein imagined a series of thought experiments that fundamentally altered our view of reality. Inside Einstein’s Mind: The Enigma of Space and Time, BBC 2015