Bertrand Russell Quotes

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man.

Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error ... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be.

Science has authority, not because of white coats, or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.

You don't want to come out with anything that's wrong, of course, in a scientific, you know, a major scientific announcement, and so you're being so careful trying to check, well maybe it's this, maybe it's that, you're looking at every possible thing.

Science isn't about authority or white coats; it's about following a method. That method is built on core principles: precision and transparency; being clear about your methods; being honest about your results; and drawing a clear line between the results, on the one hand, and your judgment calls about how those results support a hypothesis.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

But a science is exact to the extent that its method measures up to and is adequate to its object.

I time everything. I'm a scientist at heart.

Science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is you are trying to study. The key is measurement, simple as that.

When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.

At the end of the day, the numbers that we're hearing are not going to be totally correct or not correct at all.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

It is better to be approximately right than to be precisely wrong.

None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers …. People are getting from A to B and it's not clear how they are getting there....

My parents are both scientists. They like order.

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.

Any librarian or scholar will tell you: Close is not the same as accurate.

We can't just throw something out there and assume it works just because it has math in it.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.

Transparency and detail are everything in science.

The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.

We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right?

Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.