1768 rendition of English physicist and chemist Robert Boyle’s circa 1660 bird in a vacuum experiment, by English artist Joseph Wright, somewhat incorrectly entitled “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump” (incorrect on the fact that the bird as depicted is in a vacuum bulb, and not in the air pump); a noted thermodynamics anecdote: the odd experiment done so to test and hence disprove English scientist Thomas Hobbes' "wind theory of cold". [2] |
“It follows from this that all science is empty, deceptive, and pointless unless it is supported by experiment. What inconsistencies otherwise successful and perceptive scholars bring forth without its help! It is experimentation that dissolves all doubts, reconciles difficulties, is a unique teacher of the truth, furnishes a torch in darkness and instructs us how to determine the true causes of things by disentangling knotty problems.”— Athanasius Kircher (1631), Ars Magnetica (pg. 570); cited by Otto Guericke (1672) in New Magdeburg Experiments (pg. xvii)
“A thousand Demosthenes, a thousand Aristotles can be laid prostrate by a single man of mediocre talent who has seized upon a better way [experimental method] to find the truth. Such a hope, therefore, must be removed: for indeed, men, more learned and superior to us in book-learning, will be found who, to the same of nature itself, can make that which is, in fact, false, true.”— Galileo (1632), Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems; cited by Guericke in "Preface" to Magdeburg Experiments
“Theories which are demonstrated by experiment and visual perception must be preferred to those derived from reasoning, however probable and plausible, for many things seem true in speculation and discussion, which in actual fact defy reality.”
— Otto Guericke (1672), “Preface” to New So-Called Magdeburg Experiments on the Vacuum of Space