Francis Collins Quotes

Much of what we're going to try will not work, and much of what does work will do so for unanticipated reasons.

Nothing works until it does. Nobody knows anything. You don't know what people are going to respond to. People are always surprised by stuff.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

I tried out various experiments described in treatises on physics and chemistry, and the results were sometimes unexpected. At times, I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success; at others, I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience.

To me the greatest moment in an experiment is always just before I learn whether the particular idea is a good or a bad one. Thus even a failure is exciting, and most of my ideas have of course been wrong.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

With science, there is this culture of experimentation, and most of the time, those experiments fail.

When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a 'failed experiment.' Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

You can imagine: 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another.

'Eureka' moments are very, very rare in my experience. It normally takes several weeks of experiments to tease out the truth, even when you have a really pretty good idea of what is going on.

There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip.

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

When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.

Science is the practice of failing repeatedly but learning as you go.

Bad things can happen even to the best players.

In true Slipknot fashion, nothing we plan works out the way we want it.

Play is experimenting with chance.

When I was younger, I'd get very empirical with myself. "I have a hypothesis about myself. I'll put myself in a situation, see what happens, then I'll draw a conclusion based on the empirical evidence. Hypothesis: I can play basketball." So I'd try. "Conclusion: I cannot play basketball."

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.

If it doesn't work, at least it will be an interesting train wreck.