Paul Nurse Quotes

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

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

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.

If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?

[Modern science] passed through a long period of uncertainty and inconclusive experiment, but as the instrumental aids to research improved, and the results of observation accumulated, phantoms of the imagination were exorcised, idols of the cave were shattered, trustworthy materials were obtained for logical treatment, and hypotheses by long and careful trial were converted into theories.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated.

From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.

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

I love to watch how scientists' minds work.

When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.

Modern science is predicated on 'truths' verified through accurate observation and measurements of physical world phenomena.

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 ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

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

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

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Scientists are always skeptics.

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