Oliver Heaviside Quotes

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

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

Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.

There can be theory but, you know, the problem is you've got to be able to test it. So theories are one thing, testing is another.

Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

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

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

It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.

(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

The purpose of life is to conjecture and prove.

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.

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

The theory of numbers, more than any other branch of mathematics, began by being an experimental science. Its most famous theorems have all been conjectured, sometimes a hundred years or more before they were proved; and they have been suggested by the evidence of a mass of computations.

Bacon not only despised the syllogism, but undervalued mathematics, presumably as insufficiently experimental. He was virulently hostile to Aristotle , but he thought very highly of Democritus , Although he did not deny that the course of nature exemplifies a Divine purpose, he objected to any admixture of teleological explanation in the actual investigation of phenomena; everything, he held, should be explained as following necessarily from efficient causes .

[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.

The creative principle [of science] resides in mathematics.

Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough.

Data don't generate theory - only researchers do that.

I feign no hypotheses.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

We first observe facts, then generalise, and then draw conclusions or principles.

Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.

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

Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.