Brian Greene Quotes

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

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. ... Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

Theory is needed to tell you where to look.

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.

The theory must not contradict empirical facts.

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.

Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.

We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.

The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

There really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out.

It is not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.

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

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

Without a theory the facts are silent.

Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

A system such as classical mechanics may be 'scientific' to any degree you like; but those who uphold it dogmatically - believing, perhaps, that it is their business to defend such a successful system against criticism as long as it is not conclusively disproved - are adopting the very reverse of that critical attitude which in my view is the proper one for the scientist.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both.

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.

Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again, until only a fool would not believe them. I cannot prove that electrons exist..........if you don't believe in them I have a high voltage cattle prod I'm willing to apply as an argument on their behalf. Electrons speak for themselves.

Theories are not rejected by cirsumstantial evidence: it takes a theory to beat a theory.

No single theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain

Science is prediction, not explanation.

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.