"Nothing is more certain in scientific method than that approximate coincidence alone can be expected. In the measurement of continuous quantity perfect correspondence must be accidental, and should give rise to suspicion rather than to satisfaction." (William S Jevons, "The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method", 1874)
"There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method." (Karl Pearson, "The Grammar of Science", 1892)
“It must be gently but firmly pointed out that analogy is the very corner-stone of scientific method. A root-and-branch condemnation would invalidate any attempt to explain the unknown in terms of the known, and thus prune away every hypothesis.” (Archie E Heath, “On Analogy”, The Cambridge Magazine, 1918)
"The fundamental difference between engineering with and without statistics boils down to the difference between the use of a scientific method based upon the concept of laws of nature that do not allow for chance or uncertainty and a scientific method based upon the concepts of laws of probability as an attribute of nature." (Walter A Shewhart, 1940)
"Besides electrical engineering theory of the transmission of messages, there is a larger field [cybernetics] which includes not only the study of language but the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such automata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system, and a tentative new theory of scientific method." (Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics", 1948)
"The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of something new in familiar material. The process must be discussed in psychological, not logical, categories; studied in autobiographies and biographies, not treatises on scientific method; and promoted by maxim and example, not syllogism or theorem." (Milton Friedman, "Essays in Positive Economics", 1953)
"Science cannot be based on dogma or authority of any kind, nor on any institution or revelation, unless indeed it be of the Book of Nature that lies open before our eyes. We need not dwell on the processes of acquiring knowledge by observation, experiment, and inductive and deductive reasoning. The study of scientific method both in theory and practice is of great importance. It is inherent in the philosophy that the record may be imperfect and the conceptions erroneous; the potential fallibility of our science is not only acknowledged but also insisted upon." (Sir Robert Robinson, "Science and the Scientist", Nature Vol. 176 (4479), 1955)
"Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analysing, explaining, and classifying has become conscious of its limitations. […] Method and object can no longer be separated." (Werner K Heisenberg, "Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik" ["The Physicist's Conception of Nature"], 1955)
"Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic definition of truth is doomed to failure equally." (Willard v O Quine, "Word and Object", 1960)
"Model-making, the imaginative and logical steps which precede the experiment, may be judged the most valuable part of scientific method because skill and insight in these matters are rare. Without them we do not know what experiment to do. But it is the experiment which provides the raw material for scientific theory. Scientific theory cannot be built directly from the conclusions of conceptual models." (Herbert G Andrewartha, "Introduction to the Study of Animal Population", 1961)
"Statistics is the branch of scientific method which deals with the data obtained by counting or measuring the properties of populations of natural phenomena." (Sir Maurice G Kendall & Alan Stuart, "The Advanced Theory of Statistics", 1963)
"Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method. (Richard Feynman, "Mainly mechanics, radiation, and heat", 1963)
"When terms [...] evolve and change definition with time; and when the social reality which terms are intended to organize and render intelligible is also seen to be in flux, capturing the truth in a net of words becomes a matter of intuition and style more than of any scientific method that can be replicated by others and made to achieve the same result every time someone asks the same question, or undertakes the same operations." (William H McNeill, "Discrepancies among the Social Sciences", 1981)
"Science and mathematics […] have added little to our understanding of such things as Truth, Beauty, and Justice. There may be definite limits to the applicability of the scientific method." (Richard W Hamming, "Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics", 1985)
"The heart of the scientific method is the problem-hypothesis-test process. And, necessarily, the scientific method involves predictions. And predictions, to be useful in scientific methodology, must be subject to test empirically." (Paul Davies, "The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to, Order the Universe", 1988)
"Scientists use mathematics to build mental universes. They write down mathematical descriptions - models - that capture essential fragments of how they think the world behaves. Then they analyse their consequences. This is called 'theory'. They test their theories against observations: this is called 'experiment'. Depending on the result, they may modify the mathematical model and repeat the cycle until theory and experiment agree. Not that it's really that simple; but that's the general gist of it, the essence of the scientific method." (Ian Stewart & Martin Golubitsky, "Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer?", 1992)
"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." (Stephen J Gould, "This View of Life: In the Mind of the Beholder", "Natural History", Vol. 103, No. 2, 1994)
"The traditional, scientific method for studying such systems is known as reductionism. Reductionism sees the parts as paramount and seeks to identify the parts, understand the parts and work up from an understanding of the parts to an understanding of the whole. The problem with this is that the whole often seems to take on a form that is not recognizable from the parts. The whole emerges from the interactions between the parts, which affect each other through complex networks of relationships. Once it has emerged, it is the whole that seems to give meaning to the parts and their interactions." (Michael C Jackson, "Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers", 2003)
"Scientists pursue ideas in an ill-defined but effective way that is often called the scientific method. There is no strict rule of procedure that will lead you from a good idea to a Nobel prize or even to a publishable discovery. Some scientists are meticulously careful; others are highly creative. The best scientists are probably both careful and creative. Although there are various scientific methods in use, a typical approach consists of a series of steps." (Peter Atkins et al, "Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight" 6th ed., 2013)
"Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other." (John M Greer, "After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age", 2015)
"The scientific method does not begin with the injunction to use reason and logic, and to obey the principle of sufficient reason and Occam’s razor. Instead, it begins with the word 'Observe'. In other words, if reality in itself is unobservable - which is of course the case - then the scientific method automatically fails to tell us a single thing about it."
"One of the severest tests of a scientific mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of the scientific method." (James C Maxwell)
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