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Who said: “Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed.”
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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index R > Category: Reliability

Reliability Quotes (18 quotes)

An diesen Apparate ist nichts neu als seine Einfachkeit und die vollkommene zu Verlaessigkeit, welche er gewaehst.
In this apparatus is nothing new but its simplicity and thorough trustworthiness.
On his revolutionary method of organic analysis.
Poggendorf's Annalen, (1831), 21, 4. Trans. W. H. Brock.
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Question: What is the difference between a “real” and a “virtual” image? Give a drawing showing the formation of one of each kind.
Answer: You see a real image every morning when you shave. You do not see virtual images at all. The only people who see virtual images are those people who are not quite right, like Mrs. A. Virtual images are things which don't exist. I can't give you a reliable drawing of a virtual image, because I never saw one.
Genuine student answer* to an Acoustics, Light and Heat paper (1880), Science and Art Department, South Kensington, London, collected by Prof. Oliver Lodge. Quoted in Henry B. Wheatley, Literary Blunders (1893), 177-8, Question 6. (*From a collection in which Answers are not given verbatim et literatim, and some instances may combine several students' blunders.)
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An extremely healthy dose of skepticism about the reliability of science is an absolutely inevitable consequence of any scientific study of its track record.
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As for the search for truth, I know from my own painful searching, with its many blind alleys, how hard it is to take a reliable step, be it ever so small, towards the understanding of that which is truly significant.
Letter to an interested layman (13 Feb 1934). In Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Albert Einstein: The Human Side: New Glipses From His Archives (1981), 18.
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As there are six kinds of metals, so I have also shown with reliable experiments… that there are also six kinds of half-metals. I through my experiments, had the good fortune … to be the discoverer of a new half-metal, namely cobalt regulus, which had formerly been confused with bismuth.
The six metals were gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, tin. The semimetals, in addition to cobalt, were mercury, bismuth, zinc, and the reguluses of antimony and arsenic. Cited as “According to Zenzén, Brandt stated in his diary for 1741,” in Mary Elvira Weeks and Henry M. Leicester (ed.), Discovery of the Elements (6th edition, revised and enlarged 1960). Brandt presented his work to the Royal Academy of Sciences, Upsala, as printed in 'Dissertatio de semimetallis' (Dissertation on semi-metals) in Acta Literaria et Scientiarum Sveciae (Journal of Swedish literature and sciences) (1735), 4 1-10.
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I have long aspired to make our company a noble prototype of industry, penetrating in science, reliable in engineering, creative in aesthetics and wholesomely prosperous in economics.
In Alan R. Earls and Nasrin Rohani, Polaroid (2005), 7.
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In the whole of geophysics there is probably hardly another law of such clarity and reliability as this—that there are two preferential levels for the world’s surface which occur in alternation side by side and are represented by the continents and the ocean floors, respectively. It is therefore very surprising that scarcely anyone has tried to explain this law.
In The Origins of Continents and Oceans (4th ed. 1929), trans. John Biram (1966), 37.
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Insight is not the same as scientific deduction, but even at that it may be more reliable than statistics.
In Science is a Sacred Cow (1950), 123.
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It is imperative in the design process to have a full and complete understanding of how failure is being obviated in order to achieve success. Without fully appreciating how close to failing a new design is, its own designer may not fully understand how and why a design works. A new design may prove to be successful because it has a sufficiently large factor of safety (which, of course, has often rightly been called a “factor of ignorance”), but a design's true factor of safety can never be known if the ultimate failure mode is unknown. Thus the design that succeeds (ie, does not fail) can actually provide less reliable information about how or how not to extrapolate from that design than one that fails. It is this observation that has long motivated reflective designers to study failures even more assiduously than successes.
In Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering (1994), 31. books.google.comHenry Petroski - 1994
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Mathematicians can and do fill in gaps, correct errors, and supply more detail and more careful scholarship when they are called on or motivated to do so. Our system is quite good at producing reliable theorems that can be backed up. It’s just that the reliability does not primarily come from mathematicians checking formal arguments; it come from mathematicians thinking carefully and critically about mathematical ideas.
Concerning revision of proofs. In 'On Proof and Progress in Mathematics', For the Learning of Mathematics (Feb 1995), 15, No. 1, 33. Reprinted from Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (1994), 30, No. 2, 170.
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One of the most striking evidences of the reliability of the organic chemist's methods of determining molecular structure is the fact that he has never been able to derive satisfactory structures for supposed molecules which are in fact nonexistent.
Physical Organic Chemistry; Reaction Rates, Equilibria, and Mechanisms (1940),38.
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People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.
Skeptic (Jul-Aug 1976).
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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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The desire to preserve to future ages the memory of past achievements is a universal human instinct, as witness the clay tablets of old Chaldea, the hieroglyphs of the obelisks, our countless thousands of manuscripts and printed volumes, and the gossiping old story-teller of the village or the backwoods cabin. The reliability of the record depends chiefly on the truthfulness of the recorder and the adequacy of the method employed. In Asia, the cradle of civilization, authentic history goes back thousands of years; in Europe the record begins much later, while in America the aboriginal narrative, which may be considered as fairly authentic, is all comprised within a thousand years.
The first paragraph, 'Introduction: Age of American Aboriginal Records', Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians (1898).
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The institutional goal of science is the extension of certified knowledge. The technical methods employed toward this end provide the relevant definition of knowledge: empirically confirmed and logically consistent predictions. The institutional imperatives (mores) derive from the goal and the methods. The entire structure of technical and moral norms implements the final objective. The technical norm of empirical evidence, adequate, valid and reliable, is a prerequisite for sustained true prediction; the technical norm of logical consistency, a prerequisite for systematic and valid prediction. The mores of science possess a methodologic rationale but they are binding, not only because they are procedurally efficient, but because they are believed right and good. They are moral as well as technical prescriptions. Four sets of institutional imperatives–universalism, communism, disinterestedness, organized scepticism–comprise the ethos of modern science.
Social Theory and Social Structure (1957), 552-3.
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The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it’s just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.
From a sound clip from CSICOP, now CSI (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry). If you know a more specific citation, please contact Webmaster.
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Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1997), 30.
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We must have a relentless commitment to producing a meaningful, comprehensive energy package aimed at conservation, alleviating the burden of energy prices on consumers, decreasing our country’s dependency on foreign oil, and increasing electricity grid reliability.
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Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
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- 90 -
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