John Stuart Mill Quotes

The theory must not contradict empirical facts.

It is a very long and very difficult road from a fact to a conclusion. But it is a million times longer from a theory to a fact.

If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing.

You can't prove any hypothesis, you can only improve or disprove it.

Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.

In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it.

If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.

If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.

A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable. To me, that's beautiful.

Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, - if the experiments don't work, then it means it's not science.

I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

No matter how beautiful the theory, one irritating fact can dismiss the entire formulism, so it has to be proven.

There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past.

The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification.

The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal.

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism... for testing your thoughts against the universe.