George Henry Lewes Quotes

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.

Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge.

For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.

The physicist, in his study of natural phenomena, has two methods of making progress: (1) the method of experiment and observation, and (2) the method of mathematical reasoning. The former is just the collection of selected data; the latter enables one to infer results about experiments that have not been performed. There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success.

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.

In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.

Modern science is predicated on 'truths' verified through accurate observation and measurements of physical world phenomena.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

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

In experimental philosophy, we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur by which they may either be made more accurate or liable to exceptions.

Experience by itself is not science.

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

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.'

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

Something my father dearly loved is the scientific method, and it's founded in this element of humility. The idea is that you pursue the truth wherever it goes; you need to evidence, and you can - you see if it's repeatable.

Educated guesswork' is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you've got close to the truth.

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

Science is a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.