Thomas Kuhn Quotes

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

I have emphasized experiments more than theory. Of course, we need some theory when thinking of soft matter.

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

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

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

Science is about filling in the details.

One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.

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

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.

The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.

Reason and science allow us to properly think about the necessary data that are required in order to answer a given question. This is precisely why the scientific method is the most powerful framework for understanding the world.

A good scientist can understand the current state of a field, pick interesting questions where a success will actually lead to useful new knowledge, and push that field further through their work.

I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.

Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.

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

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

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

The term science means something quite different for our generation than it did not so many generations ago.

Scientific method, although in its more refined forms it may seem complicated, is in essence remarkably simply. It consists in observing such facts as will enable the observer to discover general laws governing facts of the kind in question. The two stages, first of observation, and second of inference to a law, are both essential, and each is susceptible of almost indefinite refinement. (1931)

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

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

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

Those who do good science do so because they choose problems that are suited to them.

This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.