Memories and Studies

In most things human the accusation of deliberate fraud and falsehood is grossly superficial. Man’s character is too sophistically mixed for the alternative of “honest or dishonest” to be a sharp one. Scientific men themselves will cheat — at public lectures — rather than let experiments obey their well-known tendency towards failure. I have heard of a lecturer on physics, who had taken over the apparatus of the previous incumbent, consulting him about a certain machine intended to show that, however the peripheral parts of it might be agitated, its centre of gravity remained immovable. “It will wobble,” he complained.