Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to … - Ian Hacking

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Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

Ian Hacking

Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.

Adventure, Might, Theory, Burnt, Hypothesis, Suggest

Same Author Quotes

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

Math, Science, House, Methodology, Build

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

Problem, Century, Evidence, Induction, Seventeenth

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

Statistics, Systematic, Facts, Quantitative

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

Taken, Wings, Ideas, Routinely, Molecular, Problematic

Philosophers of science constantly discuss theories and representation of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world. This is odd, because 'experimental method' used to be just another name for scientific method. . . . I hope [to] initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.

Science, Technology, Reality, Experiment, Alter