Abhijit Banerjee Quotes

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

The scientific method actually correctly uses the most direct evidence as the most reliable, because that's the way you are least likely to get led astray into dead ends and to misunderstand your data.

Thus, in general, in the first instance, the direction of interest in empirical fact will be canalised by the logical structure of the theoretical system.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

Only by observing this condition would the results of our work be regarded as fully conclusive and as having elucidated the normal course of the phenomena.

The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted.

… scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.

Hypotheses are what we lack the least.

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.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

At the beginning of all experimental work stands the choice of the appropriate technique of investigation.

Experimental observations are only experience carefully planned in advance, and designed to form a secure basis of new knowledge.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

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.

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

It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it, therefore, an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear nor very well defined.