David J. Anderson Quotes

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

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

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

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.

I love to be a scientist. I've always enjoyed being curious.

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

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.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.

if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you cannot see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other

One of the biggest and most important tools of theoretical physics is the wastebasket.

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

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 way of getting knowledge. It's a method. It's a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It's a way that everyone can go through life; that's how we should be teaching science from a very young age.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

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

Reason and science allow us to properly think about the necessary data that are required in order to answer a given question. This is precisely why the scientific method is the most powerful framework for understanding the world.

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.

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.