Result quotes

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Thomas_Aquinas

Reason

“Reason may be employed in two ways to establish a point: first for the purpose of furnishing sufficient proof of some principle, as in natural science, where sufficient proof can be brought to show that the movement of the heavens is always of uniform velocity. Reason is employed in another way, not as furnishing a sufficient proof of a principle, but as confirming an already established principle, by showing the congruity of its results, as in astrology the theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; not, however, as if this reason were sufficient, since some other theory might explain them.”
  • Source: Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica [1266-1273], Part I, question 32, article 2 (reply to objection 2), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (i.e. L. Shapeote), revised D. J. Sullivan (1952), Vol. I, 177.

F_Terry_Baker

Code Library

“The most important of these is a development support library which encourages the visibility and manageability of the product, as well as reduces clerical effort on the part of the programmers. The library is typically maintained and operated by a programming librarian who serves to control the programming assets and to provide the necessary services for both programmers and management. As a result of its use, the entire project is maintained in a centralized, up-to-date, visible form which makes its status immediately apparent to code-competent software managers and makes it possible for programmers to answer their questions directly without relying on others.”
  • Source: Baker, F. T. (1975). Software Management Through Improved Programming Technology. ACM ’75: Proceedings of the 1975 Annual Conference, 286–287. https://doi.org/10.1145/800181.810346

Claude_Bernard

Trust

“The great experimental principle, then, is doubt... We must trust our observations or our theories only after experimental verification. If we trust too much, the mind becomes bound and cramped by the results of its own reasoning; it no longer has freedom of action, and so lacks the power to break away from that blind faith in theories which is only scientific superstition.”
  • Source: From the book "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine" written by Claude Bernard published in French in 1865 as "Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale". Translated to English by Henry Copley Greene in 1927 and republished by Henry Shuman, Inc. in 1949. Chapter II, page 37. Available online at https://archive.org/details/b21270557 retrieved 2024.

Arthur_Bloch

Finagle's Second Law

“No matter what the anticipated result, there will always be someone eager to (a) misinterpret it, (b) fake it, (c) believe it happened to his own pet theory.”
  • Source: Attributed to a fictional character named Finagle, reported in the book "Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong" written by Arthur Bloch, first edition published in 1977 by Price/Stern/Sloan, Los Angeles, California. ISBN-10: 0843104287. ISBN-13: 978-0843104288. Chapter Murphology, page 15.

David_Bohm

Theory Purpose

“we must avoid postulating a new element for each new phenomenon. But an equally serious mistake is to admit into the theory only those elements which can now be observed. For the purpose of a theory is not only to correlate the results of observations that we already know how to make, but also to suggest the need for new kinds of observations and to predict their results. In fact, the better a theory is able to suggest the need for new kinds of observations and to predict their results correctly, the more confidence we have that this theory is likely to be good representation of the actual properties of matter and not simply an empirical system especially chosen in such a way as to correlate a group of already known facts.”
  • 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.

Robert_N_Britcher

Sources of Failures

“I never ran a test that didn't find at least one failure - not only is the software impure, but so are the requirements specifications. And every time we fix the software, there is a 10 percent chance - according to my anecdotal studies - we'll inject another fault. Those are the hardest to find: the faults that result from trying to get rid of them.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 56.

Fred_Brooks

Boldness in Design

“The boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for a high fraction of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were made due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (2010). The Design of Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 978-0-201-36298-5. Preface.

Marvin_Chester

Mathematical Quantum Predictions

"The mathematical predictions of quantum mechanics yield results that are in agreement with experimental findings. That is the reason we use quantum theory. That quantum theory fits experiment is what validates the theory, but why experiment should give such peculiar results is a mystery. This is the shock to which Bohr referred."'


Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Daydreaming

“One of the simplest ways to use the mind is daydreaming: playing out some sequence of events as mental images. But even this apparently easy way to order thought is beyond the range of many people... Daydreaming not only helps create emotional order by compensating in imagination for unpleasant reality — as when a person can reduce frustration and aggression against someone who has caused injury by visualizing a situation in which the aggressor is punished — but it also allows children and adults to rehearse imaginary situations so that the best strategy for confronting them may be adopted, alternative options considered, unanticipated consequences discovered — all results that help increase the complexity of consciousness. And, of course, when used with skill, daydreaming can be very enjoyable.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Flow of Thought”, page 120. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

David_Deutsch

Quantum Computation

“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature … It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes, and then sharing the results.”

Peter_Drucker

Profit a Result not a Cause

“Profit is not a cause but a result.”
  • Source: Peter F. Drucker, “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices”, New York: Harper & Row, 1973. p. 71.

Keywords: Profit_quotes Causality_quotes Result_quotes

David_Epstein

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).

Richard_Feynman

Repeatability

“A philosopher once said, 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.' Well they don't!”
  • Source: Book/Title: “The Character of Physical Law”; Author: Richard Feynman; Publication/Date: 1965; Publisher: MIT Press; Publisher/Location: Cambridge, MA; ISBN: 978-0262533416; Chapter 6; Page: 147.

Same Circumstances

“Philosophers have said that if the same circumstances don't always produce the same results, predictions are impossible and science will collapse. Here is a circumstance — identical photons are always coming down in the same direction to the piece of glass — that produces different results. We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That's a retreat, but that's the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed.”
  • Source: Feynman, R. P. (1983). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Page 19.

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.

Murray_Gell-Mann

Curiosity

“My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature?”
  • Source: Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Banquet Speech (10 Dec 1969), in Wilhelm Odelberg (ed.),Les Prix Nobel en 1969 (1970).

John_Gribbin

Scientific Method

“The Big Idea that had been developed in the seventeenth century ... is now known as the scientific method. It says that the way to proceed when investigating how the world works is to first carry out experiments and/or make observations of the natural world. Then, develop hypotheses to explain these observations, and (crucially) use the hypothesis to make predictions about the future outcome of future experiments and/or observations. After comparing the results of those new observations with the predictions of the hypotheses, discard those hypotheses which make false predictions, and retain (at least, for the time being) any hypothesis that makes accurate predictions, elevating it to the status of a theory. Note that a theory can never be proved right. The best that can be said is that it has passed all the tests applied so far.”
  • Source: John R. Gribbin. In The Fellowship: the Story of a Revolution (2005), 275.

Stephen_Hawking

Correspondence to Reality

“I don't demand that a theory corresponds to reality because I don't know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of experiment.”
  • Source: During a debate with Roger Penrose in 1994 at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, transcribed in The Nature of Space and Time (1996) by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Umiversity Press, p. 121.

Gerald_Holton

Speculation

“...guided at that moment by a speculation below the level of consciousness, a result of an intimate knowledge... built up during his years of intense study, discussions, and experimentation.”
  • Note: The article is discussing Enrico Fermi's process to solve a physics experimentation problem that came to be known as the “Miricle of the Two Tables”.

Thomas_Henry_Huxley

Consciousness

“How is it that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”
  • Source: Thomas Henry Huxley in the book “The Elements of Physiology and Hygiene: A Textbook for Educational Institutions”, published in 1869 by Appleton, New York, NY. Page 178.

William_James

Simple Sensation

“No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.”
  • Source: William James (1890). From the book "The Principles of Psychology". Volume I. Chapter 9. Published in 1980 by Henry Holy, New York, NY.

Keywords: One_quotes Simple_quotes Sensation_quotes Itself_quotes Consciousness_quotes Natal_quotes Day_quotes Teeming_quotes Multiplicity_quotes Object_quotes Relationship_quotes Call_quotes Result_quotes Discriminative_quotes Attention_quotes Push_quotes Often_quotes High_quotes Degree_quotes

Carl_Jung

Prophetic Delusion

“The danger consists in the prophet’s delusion which often is the result of dealing with the unconscious. It is the devil who says: Disdain all reason and science, mankind’s highest powers. That is never appropriate even though we are forced to acknowledge the irrational.”
  • Source: Written by Carl G. Jung On January 17, 1918-01-17 in a letter to to J. B. Lang. Letter is a private possession of Stephan Martin but is also reported in ‘The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition’, written by C. G. Jung, edited with an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani; published by W. W. Norton in 2012; ISBN 978-0393089080; Page 46.
  • Notes: This quotes makes a reference to Mephistopheles' statement in Faust (1.1851f.)

Robert_Lawrence_Kuhn

Scientific Method

“I like to distinguish between the scientific method, which is applied to all materialistic theories. The scientific method is one of observation or experimentation, repeatability, falsification, the repeatability by different techniques of different labs, or prediction and results. It's a scientific method. I say that if it's a non-physical theory, or the theory has any aspect of non-physicalism to it, it doesn't have to be all, any aspect invalidates, to some degree invalidates, the scientific method as I just described from being applicable. And I think there's a tendency in some theories that have some non-physical aspect to try to show their legitimacy by applying the scientific method... I think that's a false desire, because once you're non-physical you are invalidating, to one degree or another, the scientific method. Maybe not totally, but in some degree.”
  • Source: Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. Within the YouTube video “All 325+ Competing Consciousness Theories In One Video” on the Essentia Foundation channel, https://youtu.be/h5G6Oc_V3Lw?si=jzabxeu55GvABDFs, published 2025-08-22, video offset at 1:32:25.

Ray_Kurzweil

Improving Technology

“...nearly every aspect of life is getting progressively better as a result of exponentially improving technology.”
  • Source: Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI”, published in 2024 by Random House. ISBN 978-0593152348.

Edward_A_Murphy

Murphy's Law

Popular Version:
  “If anything can go wrong, it will.”
Original Version First Report:
  “If there are two or more ways to do something
   and one of those results in a catastrophe,
   then someone will do it that way”
Original Version Second Report:
  "If there is any way to do it wrong, he will."
  • Source:
    • Attributed to Edward A Murphy, reported in the book “Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong” written by Arthur Bloch, first edition publish in 1977 by Price/Stern/Sloan, Los Angeles, California. ISBN-10: 0843104287. ISBN-13: 978-0843104288.
    • Attributed to Edward A Murphy, reported in the article “The Science of Murphy’s Law” written by Robert A. J. Matthews, published in 'Scientific America, volume 276 number 4, April 1997, DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican0497-88.
    • Attributed to Edward A Murphy, reported in the book “The Making of a Scientist” by Anne Roe, published in 1953 by Dodd and Mead, New York, NY. ISBN 10: 0837171512. ISBN 13: 9780837171517.
  • Notes: An idea expressed by Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr. in 1949 in reference to rocket sled engineering work.

Keywords: Engineering_quotes Something_quotes Can_quotes Go_quotes Wrong_quotes Way_quotes Do_quotes One_quotes Two_quotes Result_quotes Catastrophe_quotes Someone_quotes Anything_quotes Murphy(topic)_quotes Law_quotes

John_von_Neumann

Gradual Development of Theory

“What is important is the gradual development of a theory, based on a careful analysis of the ... facts. ... Its first applications are necessarily to elementary problems where the result has never been in doubt and no theory is actually required. At this early stage the application serves to corroborate the theory. The next stage develops when the theory is applied to somewhat more complicated situations in which it may already lead to a certain extent beyond the obvious and familiar. Here theory and application corroborate each other mutually. Beyond lies the field of real success: genuine prediction by theory. It is well known that all mathematized sciences have gone through these successive stages of evolution.”
  • Source: John von Neumann, 'Formulation of the Economic Problem' in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1964), 8. Reprinted in John Von Neumann, F. Bródy (ed.) and Tibor Vámos (ed.), The Neumann Compendium (2000), 416.

Richard_Pascale

Efficiency and Variation

“Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by 'getting all the ducks in line'. To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems. Payoff results - as long as the music lasts. But in the face of nontraditional competitors or major environmental discontinuities, all that streamlining and reengineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization by those closest to the disruptive change, and curtails a bottom-up emergent response to cope more effectively... Nothing fails like success. Over-adaptive organizations become inflexible. Disruptive change leaves them as helpless as a beached whale.”
  • Source: Richard T. Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin (2010). “The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems”, p.190, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press

Unintended Consequences Inescapable

“Unintended consequences are an inescapable feature of life. Living systems do not follow a linear path. One can disturb them in a manner that approximates a desired outcome - but never fully direct them.”
  • Source: Richard T. Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin (2010). “The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems”, p.191, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press

Pearl_and_Mackenzie

Strong AI

“The successes of deep learning have been truly remarkable... Nevertheless, deep learning has succeeded primarily by showing that certain questions or tasks we thought were difficult are in fact not. It has not addressed the truly difficult questions that continue to prevent us from achieving humanlike AI. As a result the public believes that ‘strong AI,’ machines that think like humans, is just around the corner or maybe even here already. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth.”
  • Source: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie in “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect”. Published by Basic Books of New York, NY in 2018. Chapter 1, page 30. ISBN 978-0465097616 (ebook).

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.

Robert_M_Pirsig

An Experiment is Never a Failure

“An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.”
  • Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (1974), 102.

Karl_Popper

Confirmation Easy

“It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions... A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.”
  • Source: Karl Raimund Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963), 36.

Explain Away

“Whenever the ‘classical’ system of the day is threatened by the results of new experiments which might be interpreted as falsifications according to my point of view, the system will appear unshaken to the conventionalist. He will explain away the inconsistencies which may have arisen; perhaps by blaming our inadequate mastery of the system.”
  • Source: Popper, K. R. (2005). The Logic of Scientific Discovery | 1935 (1935/Epub ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

No Conclusive Disproof

“No conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable.”
  • Source: Popper, K. R. (2005). The Logic of Scientific Discovery | 1935 (1935/Epub ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Chap. 2

Frederick_Winslow_Taylor

Workman Soldiering

“After a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder and increased his output, he is likely to entirely lose sight of his employer's side of the case and to become imbued with a grim determination to have no more cuts if soldiering can prevent it.”
  • Source: F.W. Taylor (1903) "Shop management; a paper read before the American society of mechanical engineers, " in: Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 24: 1337-1480. p. 1352.

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.

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.