Paul Sabatier Quotes
Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest.
Sabatier, Paul. "The Method of Direct Hydrogenation by Catalysis." Nobel Lectures, Chemistry 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, 1966, p. 52.
A null hypothesis is a statistical scientific term that a researcher assumes and uses to compare other things to. If there are no significant, found differences, the null hypothesis is not rejected. If significant differences are found, then the null hypothesis (yesterday's truth) is then rejected. In science, no one has been right for 400 years since Aristotle. Truth is never eternal. It is continuously subjected to testing and conformation and history has shown that with new instruments, new techniques and new other findings to work from, sooner or later what we think is true today turns out to not quite be so. Often it is not completely wrong, but the old "truth" turns out to be not so in all cases or situations. For example, the mechanics of Isaac Newton was assumed for a few centuries to be true. Then along came Albert Einstein and he showed that Newton was right except when objects were traveling at very high speeds when Relativity explained them. And in less than one century, we realized that Einstein's Relativity explained everything except very small particles which are better explained by Quantum Mechanics. This process of will almost certainly continue.
Charles Paul Marie Sabatier, was a French clergyman and historian who produced the first modern biography of St. Francis of Assisi. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.
