Cleveland Abbe Quotes

When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.

I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.

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.

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

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

We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.

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.

I was not surprised by the results of the Horizon experiments, but I remain willing to observe and consider any and all other tests that are done under similarly precise conditions.

Hypotheses are what we lack the least.

Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.

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.

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

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

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.

Most importantly, I agree that the truth of these matters should be determined by interpretation of scientific evidence - experiments, fossil studies and the like.

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

Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.

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

Scientists are always skeptics.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

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.'

The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it.

if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.