Ivar Giaever Quotes

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

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.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

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

Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

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.

Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it's a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.

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.

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.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

If you're a real scientist, you're constantly open to new data. Nothing is ever 100% validated.

Something my father dearly loved is the scientific method, and it's founded in this element of humility. The idea is that you pursue the truth wherever it goes; you need to evidence, and you can - you see if it's repeatable.

We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

I think science has a better story to tell than anyone else has been able to tell and that's because it's based on the rigorous winnowing that science and scientists are always doing in order to find out what's really happening. I think it's really good to encourage generally our ability to tell stories and that's a great skill that we come by naturally, so I'm excited about that.

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones.

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

If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.

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

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