Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

Science adjusts its views based on what's observed Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Science has to be understood in its broadest sense, as a method for comprehending all observable reality, and not merely as an instrument for acquiring specialized knowledge.

Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?

Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.

Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.

If science were nothing more than the best means of teaching the love of the simple fact, the indispensable need of verification, of careful and accurate observation and statement, its value would be of the highest order.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose. To this single idea must the revolution be ascribed, by which, after groping in the dark for so many centuries, natural science was at length conducted into the path of certain progress.

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

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

How scientists go about their job: and it's a process, it's a question of asking questions, respecting observation, respecting experiment, having tentative explanations and then testing them.... There is a problem sometimes with how we teach science at schools. Because we sometimes teach it as if it has been chiseled in stone.

From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.

As man reaches out toward the twenty-first century, he will learn to be suspicious of all ideas that are not formulated so that they can be tested by observation. He will realize that the history of human thought shows that the ideas of which we are surest are the ones we most need to test. He will realize that his common sense only mirrors his training and experience. What seems natural and right to him is usually a reflection of the conditions under which he spent his first decade of life.

Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.

Science ... looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success.

To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities. But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly existed before the seventeenth century.

The great experimental principle, then, is doubt, that philosophic doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative, and from which the virtues most valuable to investigators in physiology and medicine are derived.