Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

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

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

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.

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

What intrigues basic scientists like me is that anytime we do a series of experiments, there are going to be three or four new questions that come up when you think you've answered one.

If you're a physicist, for heaven's sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn't agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term 'doubting Thomas' well illustrates the difference.

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 true method of knowledge is experiment.