The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.
Interpretation
Learning from mistakes and hands-on experience is often more valuable than relying on perfect tools.
In this quote, James Clerk Maxwell emphasizes the importance of practical experience in learning. He suggests that students who work with imperfect or homemade tools gain deeper insights and understanding from their failures and troubleshooting experiences, compared to those who only rely on well-calibrated instruments they may be hesitant to explore or question.
In practice
During a workshop on innovation, this quote can inspire students to embrace trial and error.
Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
What's the go of that? What's the particular go of that?
I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.
If we betake ourselves to the statistical method, we do so confessing that we are unable to follow the details of each individual case, and expecting that the effects of widespread causes, though very different in each individual, will produce an average result on the whole nation, from a study of which we may estimate the character and propensities of an imaginary being called the Mean Man.
Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.
He had been so busy getting away from the library, he hadn't paid attention to where he was going.
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.
Reading is, at its best, not an escape; it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions.
Whenever you hear a politician carry on about what a mess the schools are, be aware that you are looking at the culprit.
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