David Baltimore Quotes

if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics.

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

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

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

If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it.

Statistics are like blood sausage: they are delicious until you find out how they're made.

Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

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

Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy.

Every result of science is provisional and subject to future revision

To do successful research, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know one thing that isn't known.

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

I was a graduate student at Oxford when I discovered Georgiana.

Those in science perform research, have it reviewed by their peers, publish the results, and believe the answer should be obvious.

Personally I'm more into science and engineering types of things, not so much into testing 'Star Wars' myths.

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.

Science is the business of generating testable hypotheses.