Barbara Tuchman Quotes

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'

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.

Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable.

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

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.

The scientific method actually correctly uses the most direct evidence as the most reliable, because that's the way you are least likely to get led astray into dead ends and to misunderstand your data.

The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.

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.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

One finds the truth by making a hypothesis and comparing observations with the hypothesis.

When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.

Do not speculate; get data and calculate.

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

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.

Hypotheses non fingo. I frame no hypotheses.

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.