Huston Smith Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable.

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

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

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

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

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.

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.'

One finds the truth by making a hypothesis and comparing observations with the hypothesis.

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

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.

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.

Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.

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

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

In science we kill our hypothesis instead of each other.

Science is simply a powerful way of understanding what's real and what isn't, what's true and what's not. It can help us determine what works, what doesn't, for whom, and under what circumstances.

A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable. To me, that's beautiful.