Claude Bernard Quotes

In an age of specialization people are proud to be able to do one thing well, but if that is all they know about, they are missing out on much else life has to offer.

Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

That attitude does not exist so much today, but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics.

The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

There really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out.

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. ... Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

In the age of the specialist, the generalsit gets short shrift.

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.

I think at times, too many people focus on just little things and not focus on what the whole question and the whole answer is.

There's no one person that can provide all the insights I need to run the business. There are so many aspects to WeWork: Digital, real estate, operations, space, and design. I pick and choose people who can help in each aspect.

I admire people who can spend every aspect of their life in one discipline and really go all the way. I feel the only way I could achieve some type of excellence is if I connect to other people, other disciplines.

Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory

Without a theory the facts are silent.

"Integrative" simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible-from East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality.

Theory is needed to tell you where to look.

If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let's see it.

No experimental result can ever kill a theory: any theory can be saved from counterinstances either by some auxiliary hypothesis or by a suitable reinterpretation of its terms.

Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality [...] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches.

Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.

Theory is the practice of the impotent.

We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief.... In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.

A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something.

There is no knowledge without theory.

Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.