Natalie Angier Quotes

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.

If you're a scientist, and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist.

Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you're working on it - and I think writing is the same way.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Early on, when you're working in a new area of science, you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn't, and, even worse, leading others to believe it.

Science has a culture that is inherently cautious and that is normally not a bad thing. You could even say conservative, because of the peer review process and because the scientific method prizes uncertainty and penalises anyone who goes out on any sort of a limb that is not held in place by abundant and well-documented evidence.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

Take the situation of a scientist solving a problem, where he has certain data, which call for certain responses. Some of this set of data call for his applying such and such a law, while others call for another law.

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

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Science is based solely on doubt-based, disinterested examination of the natural and physical world. It is entirely independent of personal belief. There is a very important, fundamental concomitant - that is to accept absolutely nothing whatsoever, for which there is no evidence, as having any fundamental validity.

Disregard belief systems that aren't based on empirical studies.

Here is an entirely banal idea that I think has the potential to change the world: Take evidence seriously. Taking evidence seriously does not mean privileging numbers over all other forms of knowledge - theories, narratives, images. Nor does it mean the kind of radical skepticism that questions everything to the point where no action is possible.

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

I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they're supported by evidence.

To no circumstance is the wide diffusion of error in the world more owing than to our habit of adopting conclusions from insufficiently established data. An indispensable preliminary, then, in every investigation, is to get at facts. Until these are arrived at, every opinion, theory, or system, however ingeniously framed, must necessarily rest upon an uncertain basis.

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter.

I deal in facts, not forecasting the future. That's crystal ball stuff. That doesn't work.

You're neither right nor wrong because other people agree with you. You're right because your facts are right and your reasoning is right - that's the only thing that makes you right. And if your facts and reasoning are right, you don't have to worry about anybody else.

Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.

Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.