Francis Crick Quotes

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

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.

I really do think that science has an internal structure, and it makes sense, and we can test it.

If you're a physicist, for heaven's sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn't agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.

There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically -- we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!

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

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

When I was younger, I'd get very empirical with myself. "I have a hypothesis about myself. I'll put myself in a situation, see what happens, then I'll draw a conclusion based on the empirical evidence. Hypothesis: I can play basketball." So I'd try. "Conclusion: I cannot play basketball."

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.

If it turns out that we're doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that's the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we're not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we're just trying to see what happens.

The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

Experiment is the mother of knowledge.

I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

In science, a path that turns out to be a dead end is very useful because you don't devote resources to focusing on that; you go elsewheres.