Bill Maher Quotes

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Imagination should give wings to our thoughts but we always need decisive experimental proof, and when the moment comes to draw conclusions and to interpret the gathered observations, imagination must be checked and documented by the factual results of the experiment.

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.

If people don’t have an understanding of what science is and what scientists do, then they can tend to think that global warming, for example, is just a matter of opinion.

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

I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones.

For all its beauty, honesty, and effectiveness at improving the human condition, science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not. It's about consensus and teamwork and respectful critical argument, working with, and through, natural law. It requires that we utter, frequently, those hateful words - 'I might be wrong.'

It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.

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

Scientists generally, not just evolutionary biologists, don't take much for granted.

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.

In science, address the few, in literature the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgement on the few.

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.

If the experiments which I urge be defective, it cannot be difficult to show the defects; but if valid, then by proving the theory, they must render all objections invalid.