98 Quotes About Scientific-method

When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults.

Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.

When a fruit salad, a lover, or a jazz trio is just too imperfect for our tastes, we stop eating, kissing, and listening. But the law of large numbers suggests that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. Quite the opposite - we should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data.

How can you say one thing when your data shows something else. One doesn't know what was on the authors' minds and maybe they interpreted things differently but the sense is that the literature maintains an attitude somewhat like the approach of lawyers. If the jury buys it, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. In scientific publishing, the jury are the reviewers and the editors. If they are already convinced of the conclusion, if there is no voir dire, you will surely win the case.

Tout y est sobre, exact, nu, précis, correct. Un phare est un chiffre

This, in essence, is the problem with the scientific view of reality. Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something - reality - that may not be understood at all.

I was testing a hypothesis. But it was right, and then I had a unicorn to deal with. You can't just say, 'Thank you so much, go away now' to a unicorn, the way you can with atomic particles.

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.

For it is necessary in every practical science to proceed in a composite (i.e. deductive) manner. On the contrary in speculative science, it is necessary to proceed in an analytical manner by breaking down the complex into elementary principles.