Walter Gilbert Quotes

Theorists can be wrong; only nature is always right.

Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.

The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it.

The bedrock of science is the unwillingness to accept authority.

The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification.

The wonderful thing about science is that in science, faith is shakable.

We must trust to nothing but facts: these are presented to us by nature and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

Science is simply a powerful way of understanding what's real and what isn't, what's true and what's not. It can help us determine what works, what doesn't, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality.

I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

I have great hope and faith, but it's a humanistic faith based in facts; you have to believe that facts exist. We can all arrive at the same facts if we engage in the process of experimentation, observation, and verification, which can solve more of the world's major problems than a debate over whether God does or doesn't exist.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Experience by itself is not science.

Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.

Science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth

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.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt

Just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science

Facts are placed before reasonings and before ideals, even though the reasonings and the ideals be more beautiful, be seemingly more lofty, be seemingly better, be seemingly truer. The seemingly absurd and the seemingly impossible are sometimes true. The scientific disposition is to accept facts upon evidence, however absurd they may appear to our pre-conceptions.