Simon Singh Quotes

A lot of my role is advocacy, and as a scientist, you're an advocate, too, because you are coming up with a theory and having to convince your fellow scientists that you're right.

Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

Scientific research involves going beyond the well-trodden and well-tested ideas and theories that form the core of scientific knowledge. During the time scientists are working things out, some results will be right, and others will be wrong. Over time, the right results will emerge.

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a 'failed experiment.' Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.

Hypotheses are what we lack the least.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

[plaintiffs] cannot, by simply filing suit and crying ‘character assassination,” silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how divergent those views may be to plaintiffs’ interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation […] More papers, more discussion, better data, and more satisfactory models – not larger awards of damages – mark the path towards superior understanding of the world around us.

Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.

Those in science perform research, have it reviewed by their peers, publish the results, and believe the answer should be obvious.

We should be cautious about embracing data before it is published in the academic press, and must always avoid treating correlation as causation.

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

... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.

It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.

Some said, "John, print it"; others said "Not so." Some said, "It might do good"; others said, "No."

I only ask for information.

See, I am the mayor of Realville, and science is not up to a vote. It either is or isn't. Whatever it is, it is or isn't, but it's not up to a vote. Global warming doesn't exist because a "consequences of scientists" agree. Manmade global warming either is happening or it isn't, but it isn't up to a vote. But it is being presented to you as a consequences of scientists. Therefore, the science is not settled. Besides that, we all know that it's a hoax now. It's just some people don't want to accept that, but it is.

If it turns out that we're doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that's the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we're not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we're just trying to see what happens.

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

You have your words, and I have mine.

A lot of science doesn't require big "ns" but if you're trying to understand something about human health and you're looking at interventions that are not going to be either killing you or making you live forever - they're going to have some tweaking on the outcome - you need big numbers or you don't have enough power.

Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.

A scientist's life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown, the problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a matter of civil war; even though of different opinions, or of different political leanings, scientists dispute each other, they compete, but they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith "in the validity of Maxwell's or Boltzmann's equations," and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA.