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.
A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.
Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.
Theorists have wonderful ideas which take years and years to be verified.
Science is evidence-based and provides a continuing understanding of complex natural phenomena. Our understanding is constantly evolving and continually improving.
In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.
The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.
Barring some national security concern, I see no valid reason to keep peer-reviewed research from the public. To be clear, by 'peer review,' I mean scientific review and not a political filter.
There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.
If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can't realistically go unnoticed.
Scientists are very afraid of being proven wrong.
Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.
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.
A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable. To me, that's beautiful.
In science your competitors are your colleagues.
Scientists expect to be improved on and corrected; they hope to be
One scientist will interpret data one way, another in another way. One scientist may feel that an experiment is valid, another feels it's invalid. That's why scientists have discussions and put forward their opinions in conferences and papers.
Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.
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.
Truth in science is always determined from observational facts.
Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.
Science thrives on self-correction …. refutation almost always contains positive lessons that overwhelm disappointment.
Indeed, scientific truth by consensus has had a uniformly bad history.
