Michael Shermer Quotes

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

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

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

A science is something which is constructed from truth on workable axioms. There are 55 axioms in scientology which are very demonstrably true, and on these can be constructed a great deal.

Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them.

Go with the science!.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

Educated guesswork' is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you've got close to the truth.

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.

We must trust to nothing but facts: these are presented to us by nature and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

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.

We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.

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.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.