Research Limitations Quotes

Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

The history of using mice to stand in for humans in medical experiments is replete with failures.

If you run an Internet search on Vietnam and the war, most of the information you get begins at about 1962. I think this is telling. It is missing the whole period that led up to the reasons the war happened in the first place.

You can't really do a lot of research for being a mass manipulating, murdering super-villain.

The present rate of progress [in X-ray crystallography] is determined, not so much by the lack of problems to investigate or the limited power of X-ray analysis, as by the restricted number of investigators who have had a training in the technique of the new science, and by the time it naturally takes for its scientific and technical importance to become widely appreciated.

What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.

When an investigator has developed a formula which gives a complete representation of the phenomena within a certain range, he may be prone to satisfaction. Would it not be wiser if he should say 'Foiled again! I can find out no more about Nature along this line.'

If all people are unique, and if they are constantly changing each and every day, then all one can say about any social research finding is that it applied to that group of people on that given day, and given the propensity of humans to be different and to change, then it is unlikely that one would get the same results if one were to repeat the study.

I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn't look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there's only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research.

Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that.

In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years - are still in their very earliest stages.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

I did some research on cryonics and cryogenics, but I kept it to a minimum because I didn't want the science part of the novel to overshadow the fiction. Being medically accurate wasn't my main goal.

Scientists tend to build a reputation on refuting the theories of those who have gone before. Yet, whatever we hypothesize, observe, measure or record about the natural world, it leaves more unanswered questions.

Look somewhere else for someone who can follow you in your researches about numbers. For my part, I confess that they are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them.

It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most persevering researches.

The concept of what we're looking for is so important. The fact that the effect is tiny is just our misfortune.

We can look high or we can look low in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.

Knowledge acquired in biological research is seldom directly applicable to human beings ... The results of scientific research, obtained under these conditions, cannot be applied directly to human beings who vary widely in their hereditary make-up, in their environment, and in their past health record.

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

I was taught that if you're going to study something, you must understand it deeply and be familiar with primary sources. But if you write a history of the whole world, you can't do this. That's the trade-off.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Society has recognized over time that certain kinds of scientific inquiry can endanger society as a whole and has applied either directly, or through scientific/ethical constraints, restrictions on the kind and amount of research that can be done in those areas.

Of necessity, a scientist typically studies one incredibly tiny sliver of some biological system, totally ensconced within one discipline, because even figuring out how one sliver works is really hard.