Occupation: Physicist Birth: April 21, 1882 Death: August 20, 1961
It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention..
Coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory..
But ... the working scientist ... is not consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels complete freedom to utilize any method or d….
The operational approach demands that we make our reports and do our thinking in the freshest terms of which we are capable, in which we strip off th….
... the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of know….
There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea..
Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding..
My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the article….
The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it..
I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the averag….
I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bes….
To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by whic….
The feeling of understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it an….
If a specific question has meaning, it must be possible to find operations by which an answer may be given to it ... I believe that many of the quest….
It seems to me that there is a good deal of ballyhoo about scientific method. I venture to think that the people who talk most about it are the peopl….
In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations..
By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details….
The result is that a generation of physicists is growing up who have never exercised any particular degree of individual initiative, who have had no ….
The process that I want to call scientific is a process that involves the continual apprehension of meaning, the constant appraisal of significance a….
Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists..
The first business of a man of science is to proclaim the truth as he finds it, and let the world adjust itself as best it can to the new knowledge..