Research quotes

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General_Aphorisms

Publish or Perish

"Publish or perish."
  • Source: Traditional. Unidentified.

Publish and Perish

"Publish and perish."
  • Source: Traditional. Unidentified.

Isaac_Asimov

Research

“‘Research’ means ‘to search again,’ Why not? Sometimes, a new interpretation emerges that is of vast importance.”
  • Source: Isaac Asimov, chapter epigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations, edited by Isaac Asimov and Jason A. Shulman, published in 1988 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, New York. Chapter 63, page 239. ISBN 1-555-84111-2.

Reinout_Willem_van_Bemmelen

Validity of Hypothesis

“The functional validity of a working hypothesis is not a priori certain, because often it is initially based on intuition. However, logical deductions from such a hypothesis provide expectations (so-called prognoses) as to the circumstances under which certain phenomena will appear in nature. Such a postulate or working hypothesis can then be substantiated by additional observations ... The author calls such expectations and additional observations the prognosis-diagnosis method of research. Prognosis in science may be termed the prediction of the future finding of corroborative evidence of certain features or phenomena (diagnostic facts). This method of scientific research builds up and extends the relations between the subject and the object by means of a circuit of inductions and deductions.”
  • Source: Reinout Willem van Bemmelen. In 'The Scientific Character of Geology', The Journal of Geology (Jul 1961), 69, No. 4, 454-5.

William_Ian_Beardmore_Beveridge

Role of Hypothesis

“The role of hypothesis in research can be discussed more effectively if we consider first some examples of discoveries which originated from hypotheses. One of the best illustrations of such a discovery is provided by the story of Christopher Columbus’ voyage; it has many of the features of a classic discovery in science. (a) He was obsessed with an idea—that since the world is round he could reach the Orient by sailing West, (b) the idea was by no means original, but evidently he had obtained some additional evidence from a sailor blown off his course who claimed to have reached land in the west and returned, (c) he met great difficulties in getting someone to provide the money to enable him to test his idea as well as in the actual carrying out of the experimental voyage, (d) when finally he succeeded he did not find the expected new route, but instead found a whole new world, (e) despite all evidence to the contrary he clung to the bitter end to his hypothesis and believed that he had found the route to the Orient, (f) he got little credit or reward during his lifetime and neither he nor others realized the full implications of his discovery, (g) since his time evidence has been brought forward showing that he was by no means the first European to reach America.”
  • Source: W. I. B. Beveridge in his book ‘The Art of Scientific Investigation’ published in 1950 by William Heinemann, London, page 41.

David_Bohm

Extraphysical Principles

“There is no reason why an extraphysical general principle is necessarily to be avoided, since such principles could conceivably serve as useful working hypotheses. For the history of scientific research is full of examples in which it was very fruitful indeed to assume that certain objects or elements might be real, long before any procedures were known which would permit them to be observed directly.”
  • Source: David Bohm in the paper “A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables. II”. Published January 1952 in Physical Review volume 35 issue 2.

Fred_Brooks

Published Studies Too Narrow

“Published studies increasingly address narrower and narrower topics, and the large issues are less often discussed.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (2010). The Design of Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 978-0-201-36298-5. Preface.

Alistair_Cockburn

People Characteristics

"People, as active devices, have success modes and failure modes. The following are the main ones that I have named and used to date:
1. People are communicating beings, doing best face-to-face, in person, with real-time question and answer.
2. People have trouble acting consistently over time.
3. People are highly variable, varying from day to day and place to place.
4. People generally want to be good citizens, are good at looking around, taking initiative, and doing 'whatever is needed' to get the project to work.
There are other characteristics that I won’t expand here:
- People need both think time and communicating opportunities...
- People work well from examples...
- People prefer to fail conservatively than to risk succeeding differently; prefer to invent than to research, can only keep a small amount in their heads, and do make mistakes, and find it hard to change their habits.
- Individual personalities easily dominate a project.
- A person’s personality profile strongly affects their ability to perform specific assignments."

Christopher_Columbus

World Spherical

"I have always read that the world, both land and water, was spherical, as the authority and researches of Ptolemy and all the others who have written on this subject demonstrate and prove, as do the eclipses of the moon and other experiments that are made from east to west, and the elevation of the North Star from north to south."
  • Source: Written by Christopher Columbus in a 'Letter to the Sovereigns', Third Voyage, 1498-10-18.

Nigel_Cross

Conventional Problem Solving

"Conventional wisdom about problem-solving seems often to be contradicted by the behavior of expert designers. But designing has many differences from conventional problem-solving. ... we must be very wary about importing models of design behavior from other fields. Empirical studies of design activity have frequently found 'intuitive' features of design ability to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design. Some aspects of design theory, however, have tried to develop counter-intuitive models and prescriptions for design behavior."

Edward_Emil_David

Competitive Rush

"Computing has one property, unique I think, that seriously aggravates the uncertainties associated with software efforts. In computing, the research, development, and production phases are often telescoped into one process. In the competitive rush to make available the latest techniques, such as on-line consoles served by time-shared computers, we strive to take great forward leaps across gulfs of unknown width and depth."

Albert_Einstein

Cosmic Religious Feelings

“It is, therefore, quite natural that the churches have always fought against science and have persecuted its supporters. But, on the other hand, I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.”
  • Source: Albert Einstein (1930). An article. Entitled Religion and Science. Written by Albert Einstein. Published in New York Times Magazine. Published on 1930-11-09.

Intuition and Inspiration

“I believe in intuition and inspiration. ... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”
  • Source: Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97; also in Transformation : Arts, Communication, Environment (1950) by Harry Holtzman, p. 138.

Dwight_D_Eisenhower

Crises and Balance

“Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel. But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs, balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages, balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable, balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual, balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress. Lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”
  • Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell address (17 January 1961).

David_Epstein

Ill-Defined Problems

“Human intuition, it appears, is not very well engineered to make use of the best tools when faced with what the researchers called ‘ill-defined problems.’”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. Published 2019 by Riverhead Books. Chapter 5, page 106. ISBN 978-0735214484.

Giant Undertakings

“Since the 1990s, researcher Bent Flyvbjerg has kept a database that tracks giant undertakings... Only 8.5 percent of projects finished on time and on budget; 0.5 percent did that and delivered the prophesied benefits. Almost every major infrastructure project goes over budget, but at least not by as much as IT projects, which have a greater tendency to go hundreds of percent over budget. The pattern of disaster that Flyvbjerg has documented is relatively simple: With few constraints, exciting projects get too large too fast, going from big idea to giant endeavor extremely quickly.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 14. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Researcher Freedom

“The problem of researcher freedom leading to false conclusions is now known to be pervasive in science. The age of big data and big-database software makes it easier than ever to mix and match statistics in pursuit of positive results that are likely just artifacts of chance.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 38. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Replication Crisis

“The so-called replication crisis over the last decade has been painful for many scientists, but researchers in every discipline have been learning from it and working to improve their fields. It was, after all, scientists themselves who raised the alarm about their colleagues’ work (and in some cases their own work) in the first place. Increasingly, researchers now share or formally preregister their hypotheses at the start of a project. They can still deviate from the plan to explore unexpected findings, but the deviations are transparent. The point of restricting freedom in this way... is not to stifle inquiry but to make it more valuable.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 39. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Richard_Feynman

Cargo Cult

“...there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.”
  • Source: "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 345.
    • Feynman, R. P. (1974). In Feynman, R. P. (1974, June). Cargo Cult Science. Science and Engineering.

Sylvester_James_Gates

Strange Codes

“In my research I found this very strange thing, I was driven to error-correcting codes —they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? This brought me to the stark realization that I could no longer say people like Max [Tegmark] are crazy.”

Steve_Jobs

Show_Them

“We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base. We also watch industry trends pretty carefully. But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why a lot of people at Apple get paid a lot of money, because they're supposed to be on top of these things.”

Bernardo_Kastrup

Parapsychology

“Today, based on the latest research, we know that parapsychological phenomena are indeed most likely real.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 55. Chapter 4.

John_David_North

Art of Engineering

“Aeroplanes are not designed by science, but by art in spite of some pretense and humbug to the contrary. I do not mean to suggest that engineering can do without science, on the contrary, it stands on scientific foundations, but there is a big gap between scientific research and the engineering product which has to be bridged by the art of the engineer.”
  • Source: John D. North, In John D. North, 'The Case for Metal Construction', The Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, (Jan 1923), 27, 11.

Steven_Pinker

Science

“In a large society with writing and institutionalized science, the cost of an exponential number of tests is repaid by the benefit of the resulting laws to a large number of people. That is why taxpayers are willing to fund scientific research. But for the provincial interests of a single individual or even a small band, good science isn’t worth the trouble.”
  • Source: Steven Pinker (1997). How the Mind Works. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06973-0; eISBN 978-0-393-06973-0. Chapter 5 Section: Ecological Intelligence.

Rupert_Sheldrake

Empirical Approach

“Science needs to be liberated from these constrictive dogmas of mechanistic materialism... If we go beyond those dogmas, science gets much more interesting. All sorts of new research become possible. New questions can be asked. We can find out more about nature and more about consciousness by doing science in a new more open way. But what remains part of science so crucial to it is the empirical approach. The putting forward of hypotheses, the critical discussion, and the testing of hypotheses by experiment, the scientific method.”
  • Source: Rupert Sheldrake. The video “Nature's Hidden Intelligence: Morphic Fields”. Online at https://youtu.be/qrIlWrGe4w4?t=4894. Posted 2025-01-03. Video offset 1:21:34.

Herbert_Simon

Operational Research Restrictions

“The powerful algorithms associated with OR impose a strong mathematical structure on the decision problem. Their power is bought at the cost of shaping and squeezing the real-world problem to fit their computational requirements.”

Psychology of Choice

“Research findings on the psychology of choice, indicate some properties a thermometer of satisfaction should have. First, unlike the utility function, it is not limited to positive values, but has a zero point (of minimal contentment). Above zero, various degrees of satisfaction are experienced, and below zero, various degrees of dissatisfaction. Second, if periodic readings are taken of people in relatively stable life circumstances, we only occasionally find temperatures very far from zero in either direction, and the divergent measurements tend to regress over time back toward the zero mark. Most people consistently register either slightly below zero (mild discontent) or a little above (moderate satisfaction). To deal with these phenomena, psychology employs the concept of aspiration level... Aspiration levels provide a computational mechanism for satisficing.”

Patrick_Vlaskovits

Faster Horse

“However, even if Ford didn’t verbalize his thoughts on customers’ ostensible inability to communicate their unmet needs for innovative products — history indicates that Henry Ford most certainly did think along those lines... Henry Ford froze the design of the Model T... Ford had no compelling reason to innovate in any other sphere other than cost and price reduction... But everything changed with the onset of the innovations introduced by General Motors in the 1920s, which took the direct opposite of Henry Ford’s tack of “Any color … so long as it is black” and is best summed up by Alfred Sloan’s consumer-research driven “A Car for Every Purse and Purpose”... In 1921, the Ford Motor Company sold about 2/3 of all the cars built in the U.S. By 1926, this share had fallen to approximately 1/3. And in 1927, when Ford belatedly responded (at tremendous financial cost and internal strife) to changes in the market’s tastes and competitive innovation by shutting down production temporarily to re-tool his factories and bring the Model A to the market, that percentage fell to about 15%... Yes, some customers in certain types of businesses are quite capable of verbalizing precisely what sort of innovative product one could build and sell them. And of course, customers in other types of businesses are wholly incapable of verbalizing, with any sort of fidelity whatsoever, what they need and why they need it. An innovator should have understanding of one’s customers and their problems via empirical, observational, anecdotal methods or even intuition. They should also feel free to ignore customers’ inputs. Because by now it should be clear that Ford’s adherence to his vision of the mass-market car and how to materialize that vision was instrumental in both his early success in growing Ford Motor Company as well as his later failure to respond in a timely and effective manner to rapid innovation in the marketplace.”'

Alfred_Wegener

Continental Drift

“The first concept of continental drift first came to me as far back as 1910, when considering the map of the world, under the direct impression produced by the congruence of the coast lines on either side of the Atlantic. At first I did not pay attention to the ideas because I regarded it as improbable. In the fall of 1911, I came quite accidentally upon a synoptic report in which I learned for the first time of palaeontological evidence for a former land bridge between Brazil and Africa. As a result I undertook a cursory examination of relevant research in the fields of geology and palaeontology, and this provided immediately such weighty corroboration that a conviction of the fundamental soundness of the idea took root in my mind.”
  • Source: Alfred L. Wegener, In The Origins of Continents and Oceans (4th ed. 1929), trans. John Biram (1966), 1.

Gerald_Weinberg

Programming Not Individual

“But there is much evidence, as we shall see presently, to argue that the proper study of programming is done at the level of the programming social unit. Not that the individual level is unimportant, but we might start by asking why, if the average programmer spends two-thirds of his time working with other people rather than working alone (yes, it's true!), that 99 percent of the studies have been on individual programmers.”
  • Source: Chapter 3. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Natural Attitude

“The most treacherous enemy of such research is what philosophers call ‘the natural attitude,’ our capacity to live daily life in a way that takes for granted the objects and activities that surround us. Even when we encounter new objects in our environment, our tendency is to experience them in terms of categories and qualities with which we are already familiar. The natural attitude allows us to assume and predict a great many things about each other's behavior without first establishing premises at the outset of every interaction. The natural attitude can also stand in the way of awareness, for ordinary experience has to be made extraordinary in order to become accessible to reflection. This occurs when we encounter a problem: when our actions do not yield the expected results, we are caught by surprise and so are motivated to reflect upon our initial assumptions. Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 13. ISBN:0465032125.