Denis Diderot Quotes

You don’t make progress in science by finding things that are right. You make progress by finding things that are wrong. You won’t win the Nobel Prize by showing Einstein was right. You win the prize by showing that he was wrong.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

There's no such thing as 'facts of life'. Only standing theories that haven't been disproved as of yet.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.

I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.

A good scientist goes beyond the data he has. He applies new concepts he hadn't applied before….On some things, I was not right, but ... you can propose these ideas and stimulate thinking

I had no need of that hypothesis.

No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment. For this reason the discoverer of a new fact seldom feels quite so confident of it as others do.

When we are accustomed to use bad reasons for proving natural effects, we are not willing to receive good reasons when they are discovered

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

I know that science is very interested in answers, and I'm just happy with a good question.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable.

People confuse the word cynicism with the word skepticism. One is “you’re not gonna pay attention to anything, think everything’s screwed up, nothing’s ever gonna work out right”, that’s cynicism. But skepticism is, “you’re presented with evidence and you do your best to draw conclusions based on that”. So, as the saying goes, Bill Nye, do you believe in ghosts? No. However, I would love to see one. Bring it on. I’m open minded to the idea, but the more I look into it in a skeptical frame of thinking, the less likely it seems.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. 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.

It is among men of genius and science that atheism alone is found.

Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.

The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.

When all else fails, philosophize.