Charles Francis Richter Quotes

Science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is you are trying to study. The key is measurement, simple as that.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

I belong to those theoreticians who know by direct observation what it means to make a measurement. Methinks it were better if there were more of them.

There's no term to the work of a scientist.

A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

I was still enjoying coaching, but there was a repetitious manner about it.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

It seemed to me that NASA, especially Goddard, was the place where I could carry out the dreams that I had, which were to push forward an experiment that would measure the big bang radiation better than anyone had ever tried before. Therefore, it seemed like the perfect place to go.

Usually a video's fun, but after a while, after a couple hours it's like work because you've got to keep doing the scenes over and over and over again.

I see no difference between scientific exploration and human exploration.

I’m sick of asking questions everyone else already knows the answers to.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.

In physical science a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.

I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. It has long been known that one horse can run faster than another - but which one? Differences are crucial.

Day in, day out. That same old voodoo follows me about.

You can't just live in phenomenon and not research it.

The first steps in the path of discovery, and the first approximate measures, are those which add most to the existing knowledge of mankind.

There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.

Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

Was this normalcy-predictable patterns, the certainty of doing the same thing everyday? Because if so, normalcy was about to make me freak out and start screaming.

Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.