Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die

Experimenters are the shocktroops of science… An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. But before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned – the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted – Nature’s answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of theorists, who find himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics.

Empiricism provides the standard to which beliefs should answer. If we are capable of finding out what kind of world we live in, surely the best way of doing so is through our experience of it.

Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die.

Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (...) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not.

I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker.

The reason we can say today that we know all this stuff, that we think our theoretical models represent reality, is not because we have pretty mathematics but because we have done experiments.

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.

We create product not to show how good we are, but to measure how good we are.

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

Considered in itself, the experimental method is nothing but reasoning by whose help we methodically submit our ideas to experience,—the experience of facts.

It is not what we know, but what we can prove.

I'm an experimentalist. I like to look at hard data. And there — string theory is a distant second to because it doesn't make any observable predictions. ... As an experimentalist, I like when a theory makes a prediction. My job is to not prove theorists right — it's to disprove everybody else.

Mere numbers cannot bring out... the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work ... What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas!... The experimenter judges what may be going on in (the subject’s) mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description!