Top 100 Quotes About Scientific Method
#1. A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.
Robert A. Heinlein
#2. [T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it ...
Henri Frederic Amiel
#3. Method is always tied to subject matter, and in dealing with life in general there is no such thing as a single scientific method.
Dallas Willard
#4. Every single phenomenon in the world, has a physical explanation underneath it. Finding the explanation depends on how far you are willing to go.
Abhijit Naskar
#5. Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.
Mortimer J. Adler
#6. There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.
Karl Popper
#7. Our modern conception of the universe is so foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#8. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#9. Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#10. . . . the abandonment of metaphysics involves more than the redefinition of the nature of rational inquiry in accordance with the tenets of modern scientific methodology; this redefinition itself makes matters of value and validity mere matters of opinion.
Alan White
#11. The scientific method is nothing more than a system of rules to keep us from lying to each other.
Ken Norris
#12. We have to learn how scientists arrive at decisions. Once you use the scientific method, it doesn't mean that your decisions will be perfect. They'll be far more accurate than just opinions.
Jacque Fresco
#13. 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.
Vladimir Nabokov
#14. The quest for absolute certainty is an immature, if not infantile, trait of thinking.
Herbert Feigl
#15. We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
Antoine Lavoisier
#16. Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.
Richard P. Feynman
#17. The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically - and even messianically - driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as "scientific planning.
Paul Edward Gottfried
#18. Science is never rigid, it is flexible. It can bend towards any direction that ultimately tends to do good to humanity. Religion must learn the same. And the moment any religion learns that, it would become the most scientific religion in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
#19. The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
Terence McKenna
#20. In my view, the combination of the first-person method with the third-person method offers the promise of a real advance in the scientific study of consciousness.
Dalai Lama XIV
#21. Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#22. I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
#23. We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment ... [it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.
James Q. Wilson
#25. What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense.
Pierre Laplace
#26. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
Carl Sagan
#27. Scientific advertising has altered many old plans and conceptions. It has proved many long established methods to be folly
Claude C. Hopkins
#28. Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.
Auguste Comte
#29. Undoubtedly, modern Science is rational and the scientific method is based on rationality. But rationality is a wider concept, and it can explore what is beyond the scope of Science and its method.
Corrado Ghinamo
#30. The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.
Anthony Collins
#31. It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility.
Henry John Stephen Smith
#32. Part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking, and the scientific method. Gullibility kills.
Carl Sagan
#33. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
#34. A scientific or technical study always consists of the following three steps:
1. One decides the objective.
2. One considers the method.
3. One evaluates the method in relation to the objective.
Genichi Taguchi
#35. My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.
Paul Davies
#36. This is not a dictatorship, this is based upon scientific evidence to support a given project. If you want to put up a building, say half a mile high, the material has to be available. Using statistics is not a dictatorship. It's a method of getting the most from existing resources.
Jacque Fresco
#37. Ridicule is not a part of the scientific method and the public should not be taught that it is
J. Allen Hynek
#38. What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.
Werner Heisenberg
#39. That's the whole point to the Scientific Method. It can never actually verify truth, but it can show what is not true.
Jim Haines
#41. Zen is the most scientific method to inquire into your consciousness. It takes you beyond mind into a space called no-mind. No self, but pure awareness, and you have a taste of eternity and immortality.
Rajneesh
#42. There is no scientific proof that only scientific proofs are good proofs; no way to prove by the scientific method that the scientific method is the only valid method.
Peter Kreeft
#43. If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.
C.S. Lewis
#44. Statistics is the branch of scientific method which deals with the data obtained by counting or measuring the properties of populations of natural phenomena.
Maurice Kendall
#45. Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.
Stefan Molyneux
#46. Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it's futile to continue playing (conceptualizing).
Bill Gaede
#47. We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.
Carl Sagan
#48. This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#49. experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results. His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon
Oscar Wilde
#50. The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.
Carl Sagan
#51. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
Robert M. Pirsig
#52. Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward.
Seth Godin
#53. Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth, - that of alchemy, operational success.
George Soros
#54. ... Weber insists that the value of science is always to be questioned and not simply presupposed... He is... critical of the presupposition which underlies Strauss' position, namely that scientific reason is necessarily of value.
Nicholas Gane
#55. Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ...
Isaac Asimov
#56. Unlike those theists who at least pay lip service to science and scientific method, Johnson is out to convict science of fraud in the court of public opinion.
Victor J. Stenger
#57. The modern scientific method in which experiments form part of a structured system of hypothesis, experimentation, and analysis is as recent as the seventeenth century; the problem-solving technology of cooking goes back thousands of years.
Bee Wilson
#58. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible, and those who believe that "belief" must be discarded and replaced by "the scientific method.
Max Born
#59. The Marxist outlook ... represents the most consistent and systematic application of the scientific outlook and method.
Bob Avakian
#60. From Roger Bacon, the 13th century Franciscan who pioneered the scientific method, to George Lemaitre, the 20th century Belgian priest who first developed a mathematical foundation for the 'Big Bang,' people of faith have played a key role in advancing scientific understanding.
Kenneth R. Miller
#61. She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn't feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method.
Neal Stephenson
#62. It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#63. The scientific method ... is nothing but the exclusion of subjective opinions as far as possible, by the devising of experiments where observation can give objective answers, yes or no, to questions whether events are causally connected.
Gavin De Beer
#64. The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.
John Dewey
#65. It is fair to say that science provides no method of controlling the mind. Scientific work on the brain does not explain the mind-not yet.
Wilder Penfield
#66. We simulated the predator with livestock and the perennial grassland returned. Just put the whole back, and there it was. You'll find the scientific method never discovers anything. Observant, creative people make discoveries. But the scientific method protects us from cranks like me.
Allan Savory
#67. This point of scientific method merely shows (what no one to my knowledge ever denied) that if miracles did occur, science, as science, could not prove, or disprove, their occurrence.
C.S. Lewis
#68. The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.
Karl Pearson
#69. It is the rule which says that the other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification.
Karl Popper
#70. I'm very curious to meet a guy who makes you completely forsake the scientific method in favor of unfounded supposition and speculation."
"It's called intuition!
Rosemary Clement-Moore
#71. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.
Jonah Lehrer
#72. Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.
Edward Abbey
#73. My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.
John Astin
#74. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.
George Orwell
#75. I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.
Frederik Pohl
#76. There is no skepticism without science and the scientific method. It's about how we know what we know.
Steven Novella
#77. Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot.
Isaac Asimov
#78. The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.
Isaiah Berlin
#79. Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
Alfred North Whitehead
#80. The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you actually don't know.
Robert M. Pirsig
#81. Since Humanism as a functioning credo is so closely bound up with the methods of reason and science, plainly free speech and democracy are its very lifeblood. For reason and scientific method can flourish only in an atmosphere of civil liberties.
Corliss Lamont
#82. Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them.
Arthur Erickson
#83. Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?
Liu Cixin
#84. I used to think there was a scientific way to do things. Like a proper way to answer a question or that kind of stuff. It's like, there's not! There's not a method, there's not a science to it.
Hunter Hayes
#85. I don't have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It's not a scientific thing.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#86. That there is no such thing as the scientific method, one might easily discover by asking several scientists to define it. One would find, I am sure, that no two of them would exactly agree. Indeed, no two scientists work and think in just the same ways.
Joel Henry Hildebrand
#87. Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.
Bill Gaede
#88. For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.
Thomas Piketty
#89. Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object.
Werner Heisenberg
#90. The scientific method is nearly perfect for understanding the physical aspects of our life. But it is a radically limited viewfinder in its inability to offer values, morals and meanings that are at the center of our lives.
Huston Smith
#91. In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely.
Nathan Myhrvold
#92. I simply go with what works. And what works is the healthy skepticism embodied in the scientific method. Believe me, if the Bible had ever been shown to be a rich source of scientific answers and enlightenment, we would be mining it daily for cosmic discovery.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#93. An individual cannot be considered entirely sane if he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.
Alfred Korzybski
#94. The scientific method gives us information by testing and repeating observable things so that we can find the rules for the way that the universe generally works. But if you were to try and use it to prove that Henry VIII had six wives, you would be powerless.
Lewis N. Roe
#95. When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.
Albert Einstein
#96. Scientists are human - they're as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.
Cyril Ponnamperuma
#97. When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.
Huston Smith
#98. There is no shortcut to truth, no way to gain knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of the scientific method.
Karl Pearson
#99. Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.
Percy Williams Bridgman
#100. It is certainly true that principles cannot be more securely founded than on experience and consciously clear thinking.
Albert Einstein
