Norbert Wiener Quotes

Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it's a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.

… scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects.

If you don't have material, you don't have an experiment.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.

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

People will often take an interesting experimental study which has been done in the world, perhaps at small scale, and then it's touted as some big solution.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Theorists have wonderful ideas which take years and years to be verified.

It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena.

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

What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

Science has authority, not because of white coats, or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.

The process of science is difficult and challenging. It involves always being aware that your ideas might be right or they might be wrong. I think it's that kind of balance that makes science so interesting.

There can be theory but, you know, the problem is you've got to be able to test it. So theories are one thing, testing is another.

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

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

The scientific method actually correctly uses the most direct evidence as the most reliable, because that's the way you are least likely to get led astray into dead ends and to misunderstand your data.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a 'failed experiment.' Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it.

Science is not, despite how it is often portrayed, about absolute truths. It is about developing an understanding of the world, making predictions, and then testing these predictions.

Only by observing this condition would the results of our work be regarded as fully conclusive and as having elucidated the normal course of the phenomena.

Measurements, observations, descriptions can only be considered scientific when they are independently confirmed by other people.

In my grandfather's lab, scientists did independent research, and peers reviewed and commented on its merits. Politics, he taught me, had no place in the scientific process.