William Kingdon Clifford Quotes

A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

It is a very long and very difficult road from a fact to a conclusion. But it is a million times longer from a theory to a fact.

Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.

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

There really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out.

It is not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. ... Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

I'm first and foremost a scientist.

A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

Scientists don't read theology; they don't read philosophy. It doesn't make any difference to what they're doing - for better or worse, it may not be a value judgment, but it's true.

We need to get across the excitement and creativity of science. That it isn't just a list of facts that have already been discovered - but a process, a creative project, that you are generating ideas, testing them and looking for evidence.

I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.

I'm a firm believer in science.

Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.

A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.

Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.

Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge.

The hypotheses we accept ought to explain phenomena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this: our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both.