[Ads-l] Quote: If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment. Attributed to Ernest Rutherford by J. M. Hammersley, Oct. 1961

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Back in December 2018 I posted about the saying in the subject line.
Now the QI website has an entry:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/05/15/stats/

Garson

On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 11:26 AM ADSGarson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The statement in the subject line appears in "The Oxford Dictionary of
> 20th Century Quotations" and some other references with a 1967
> citation. Rutherford died in 1937. Here is an Oct. 1961 citation.
> Antedatings welcome.
>
> [ref] 1962 August, U. S. Army Research Office (Durham), Report No.
> 62-2, Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on the design of
> Experiments in Army Research Development and Testing, Sponsored by the
> Army Mathematics Steering Committee conducted at U. S. Army Signal
> Research & Development Laboratory, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, Date:
> October 18-20, 1961, Article: Monte Carlo Methods, Author: J. M.
> Hammersley (Oxford University and Princeton University), Start Page
> 17, Quote Page 18, Published by: U. S. Army Research Office (Durham),
> Box CM, Duke Station, Durham, North Carolina. (HathiTrust Full
> View)[/ref]
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> In Monte Carlo work we can take heed of Lord Rutherford's dictum: "If
> your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better
> experiment." In a sense, all good Monte Carlo work is
> self-liquidating: although we start out with random numbers in order
> to solve a problem, which may seem to be intractable by conventional
> numerical analysis, nevertheless we should strive to reduce their
> influence on the final result, and one should always seize any
> opportunity to replace a part or even the whole of the sampling
> experiment by exact analysis.
> [End excerpt]
>
> Garson

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