John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is directand simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.

If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?

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

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

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.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Yes, the natural sciences are telling us a great deal about human origins, the origins of our species the origins of our minds; we're on our way to explaining a large part of it. I'll accept an answer provided only by such means as obtaining and exploring, analyzing and arguing over the evidence - not because of a scribe's myopic view of the subject written 500 years before the birth of Christ!

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.

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

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

How scientists go about their job: and it's a process, it's a question of asking questions, respecting observation, respecting experiment, having tentative explanations and then testing them.... There is a problem sometimes with how we teach science at schools. Because we sometimes teach it as if it has been chiseled in stone.

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

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.

For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.

The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

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

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.

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 true method of knowledge is experiment.

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

The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.