Humphry Davy Quotes

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

I am a caricature of what British science is about in the way I work.

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.

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.

One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.

It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.

Science demands patience.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.

There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.

The contradictory experiments of chemists leave us at liberty to conclude what we please. My conclusion is, that art has not yet invented sufficient aids to enable such subtle bodies [air, light, &c.] to make a well-defined impression on organs as blunt as ours; that it is laudable to encourage investigation but to hold back conclusion.

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.

Scientists construct facts by constantly making decisions about what they will consider significant, what experiments they should pursue, and how they will describe their observations.

as an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information.

Everyone has been taught that technique is an application of science.... This traditional view is radically false. It takes into account only a single category of science and only a short period of time

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject; no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.

Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.