Accuracy Quotes (8)

Conclusions
I. A curve has been found representing the frequency distribution of standard deviations of samples drawn from a normal population.
II. A curve has been found representing the frequency distribution of values of the means of such samples, when these values are measured from the mean of the population in terms of the standard deviation of the sample…
IV. Tables are given by which it can be judged whether a series of experiments, however short, have given a result which conforms to any required standard of accuracy or whether it is necessary to continue the investigation.
'The Probable Error of a Mean', Biometrika, 1908, 6, 25.
See also:  |  Experiment (199)  |  Statistics (49)

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Adagia. In Opus Postumous: Poems, Plays, Prose (1958), 158.
See also:  |  Observation (142)  |  Thinking (56)

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.
The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (1988). In Vicki Cassman, Human Remains (2008), 69.
See also:  |  Conflict (7)  |  Moral (11)  |  Science (444)

Suppose the results of a line of study are negative. It might save a lot of otherwise wasted money to know a thing won't work. But how do you accurately evaluate negative results? ... The power plant in [the recently developed streamline trains] is a Diesel engine of a type which was tried out many [around 25] years ago and found to be a failure. ... We didn't know how to build them. The principle upon which it operated was sound. [Since then much has been] learned in metallurgy [and] the accuracy with which parts can be manufactured
When this type of engine was given another chance it was an immediate success [because now] an accuracy of a quarter of a tenth of a thousandth of an inch [prevents high-pressure oil leaks]. ... If we had taken the results of past experience without questioning the reason for the first failure, we would never have had the present light-weight, high-speed Diesel engine which appears to be the spark that will revitalize the railroad business.
'Industrial Prospecting', an address to the Founder Societies of Engineers (20 May 1935). In National Research Council, Reprint and Circular Series of the National Research Council (1933), No. 107, 2-3.
See also:  |  Experience (57)  |  Failure (20)  |  Manufacturing (5)  |  Money (69)  |  Oil (6)  |  Principle (31)  |  Railroad (3)  |  Result (25)  |  Train (3)

The experimental investigation by which Ampere established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science. The whole theory and experiment, seems as if it had leaped, full grown and full armed, from the brain of the 'Newton of Electricity'. It is perfect in form, and unassailable in accuracy, and it is summed up in a formula from which all the phenomena may be deduced, and which must always remain the cardinal formula of electro-dynamics.
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), Vol. 2, 162.
See also:  |  Achievement (33)  |  André-Marie Ampère (5)  |  Brain (58)  |  Cardinal (2)  |  Current (5)  |  Deduction (13)  |  Electricity (30)  |  Electrodynamics (3)  |  Experiment (199)  |  Formula (16)  |  Investigation (25)  |  Law (134)  |  Leap (2)  |  Mechanics (16)  |  Perfection (12)  |  Phenomenon (25)  |  Theory (179)

They [mathematicians] only take those things into consideration, of which they have clear and distinct ideas, designating them by proper, adequate, and invariable names, and premising only a few axioms which are most noted and certain to investigate their affections and draw conclusions from them, and agreeably laying down a very few hypotheses, such as are in the highest degree consonant with reason and not to be denied by anyone in his right mind. In like manner they assign generations or causes easy to be understood and readily admitted by all, they preserve a most accurate order, every proposition immediately following from what is supposed and proved before, and reject all things howsoever specious and probable which can not be inferred and deduced after the same manner.
Mathematical Lectures (1734), 65-66.
See also:  |  Axiom (8)  |  Cause (49)  |  Conclusion (24)  |  Hypothesis (83)  |  Investigate (3)  |  Mathematician (66)  |  Name (18)  |  Nature of Mathematics (2)  |  Order (21)  |  Proof (59)  |  Proposition (8)  |  Reject (3)  |  Understanding (94)

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1997), 30.
See also:  |  Belief (37)  |  Prophecy (2)  |  Reliability (3)  |  Religion (68)

When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backwards and forwards, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing?
Hermann von Helmholtz, Edmund Atkinson (trans.), Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects: First Series (1883), 29.
See also:  |  Church (4)  |  Discovery (166)  |  Galileo Galilei (55)  |  Independent (6)  |  Longitude (2)  |  Measurement (62)  |  Oscillation (2)  |  Pendulum (6)  |  Seaman (2)  |  Time (55)

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