Eric Maskin Quotes

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Science is not, despite how it is often portrayed, about absolute truths. It is about developing an understanding of the world, making predictions, and then testing these predictions.

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

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.

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.

Science is knowledge arranged and classified according to truth, facts, and the general laws of nature.

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

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

Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

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

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena.

The aim of natural science is not simply to accept the statements of others, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature.

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.

Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it's a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable.

You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation.

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.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

The deductive method is the mode of using knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of acquiring it.