But ... the working scientist ... is not consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels complete freedom to utilize any method or device whatever which in the particular situation before him seems likely to yield the correct answer. ... No one standing on the outside can predict what the individual scientist will do or what method he will follow.
Percy Williams BridgmanScience is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.
Percy Williams BridgmanBy far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.
Percy Williams Bridgman... the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.
Percy Williams BridgmanI can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy.
Percy Williams BridgmanThe result is that a generation of physicists is growing up who have never exercised any particular degree of individual initiative, who have had no opportunity to experience its satisfactions or its possibilities, and who regard cooperative work in large teams as the normal thing. It is a natural corollary for them to feel that the objectives of these large teams must be something of large social significance.
Percy Williams Bridgman