Orson Scott Card Quotes

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism... for testing your thoughts against the universe.

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, - if the experiments don't work, then it means it's not science.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

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

Experience by itself is not science.

The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'

Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.

Imagination should give wings to our thoughts but we always need decisive experimental proof, and when the moment comes to draw conclusions and to interpret the gathered observations, imagination must be checked and documented by the factual results of the experiment.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

Science is something that you have facts. They can be tested. They can be checked. Heterosexual AIDS, another one.

Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge—the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.

Experiment is the sole source of truth.

In physics, opinions don't matter, only demonstrated experiments. The day the fellow succeeds, if ever, he won't need anybody else's opinion.

The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition by having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them.

First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.

The test of all knowledge is experiment.

I'm not a religious man... I find I am a fan of science. I believe in science. A humility before the facts. I find that a moving and beautiful thing. And belief in the unknown I find less interesting. I find the known and the knowable interesting enough.

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.

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

Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.