Albert Einstein Quotes

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both.

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

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

In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.

Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.

It is not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.

Scientific method, although in its more refined forms it may seem complicated, is in essence remarkably simply. It consists in observing such facts as will enable the observer to discover general laws governing facts of the kind in question. The two stages, first of observation, and second of inference to a law, are both essential, and each is susceptible of almost indefinite refinement. (1931)

The test of all knowledge is experiment.

Science emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and that the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations.

To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

I'm first and foremost a scientist.

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance.

Science, in its ultimate ideal, consists of a set of propositions arranged in a hierarchy, the lowest level of the hierarchy being concerned with particular facts, and the highest with some general law, governing everything in the universe. The various levels in the hierarchy have a two-fold logical connection, travelling one up, one down; the upward connection proceeds by induction, the downward by deduction.

Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory.

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

Experiment is the sole interpreter of the artifices of Nature.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

Experiment is fundamentally only induced observation.

With no specific procedure, man arrived at sweeping conclusions about the universe that have proven to be true.