Ben Goldacre Quotes

Science has authority, not because of white coats, or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

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

One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn't matter where you were born, and it doesn't matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you'll get the same result.

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

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

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.

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions - and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

The heart of science is measurement.

Scientists are always skeptics.

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.

If you're a real scientist, you're constantly open to new data. Nothing is ever 100% validated.

Science is a wonderful way of getting out what's real.

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.

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

The process of science is difficult and challenging. It involves always being aware that your ideas might be right or they might be wrong. I think it's that kind of balance that makes science so interesting.

Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.

The thrill of science is the process. It's a social process. It's a process of collective discovery. It's debate, it's experimentation and it's verification of claims that might be false. It's the greatest foundation for a society.

I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

Measurements, observations, descriptions can only be considered scientific when they are independently confirmed by other people.

In my grandfather's lab, scientists did independent research, and peers reviewed and commented on its merits. Politics, he taught me, had no place in the scientific process.