Karl Popper Quotes

In real science a hypothesis can never be proved true...A science which confines itself to correlating phenomena can never learn anything about the reality underlying the phenomena, while a science which goes further than this and introduces hypotheses about reality, can never acquire certain knowledge of a positive kind about reality; in whatever way we proceed, this is forever denied us.

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

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.

In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.

There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method.

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

Science is prediction, not explanation.

SCIENCE: a way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong.

Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.

There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.

Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

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

There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.

But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Law Giver.

Science...has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must have included any role for God.

The test of all knowledge is experiment.

I'm not a religious man... I find I am a fan of science. I believe in science. A humility before the facts. I find that a moving and beautiful thing. And belief in the unknown I find less interesting. I find the known and the knowable interesting enough.

Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science.

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

In science we kill our hypothesis instead of each other.