Scientific Uncertainty Quotes

When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

Goodness, I know nothing about nuclear energy.

Policy decisions on climate change are being deliberated every day by those without full knowledge of the science, and often with intentional misinformation spawned by special interests.

Scientists tend to focus on what they don't know more than what they do know. And there are a lot of things we still don't know about the climate. But we know the difference between climate variability and climate change, and right now the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is well outside the variability pattern - and that's quite quantifiable.

A scientist is never certain. ... We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning.

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

Science is uncertain.

The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.

I don't know the science behind climate change. I can't say one way or another what is the direct impact, whether it's man-made or not.

Life is short, science is long; opportunity is elusive, experiment is dangerous, judgement is difficult.

Hopes are always accompanied by fears, and, in scientific research, the fears are liable to become dominant.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

One should proceed with caution. We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that is causing such hysteria, we have only a movie made by a politician and mathematical models whose results change drastically when you change a few of the arbitrarily selected variables.

Hitherto the principle of causality was universally accepted as an indispensable postulate of scientific research, but now we are told by some physicists that it must be thrown overboard. The fact that such an extraordinary opinion should be expressed in responsible scientific quarters is widely taken to be significant of the all-round unreliability of human knowledge. This indeed is a very serious situation.

Experimental science hardly ever affords us more than approximations to the truth; and whenever many agents are concerned we are in great danger of being mistaken.

The negative cautions of science are never popular.

The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'

For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .

Any scientist who tells you they know that GMOs are safe and not to worry about it, is either ignorant of the history of science or is deliberately lying. Nobody knows what the long-term effect will be.

But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.

Because we aren't certain about the effects of GMOs, we must consider one of the guiding principles in science, the precautionary principle. Under this principle, if a policy or action could harm human health or the environment, we must not proceed until we know for sure what the impact will be. And it is up to those proposing the action or policy to prove that it is not harmful.

There's a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It's kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don't know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.

...the proposed air force and army experiments were designed so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single human life or benefit humans in any way at all; but the same can be said of millions of their experiments performed each year in the United States alone.