Louis Pasteur Quotes

Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

With no specific procedure, man arrived at sweeping conclusions about the universe that have proven to be true.

Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new; it alone can give us certainty.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

With science, there is this culture of experimentation, and most of the time, those experiments fail.

One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

Science rejects the indeterminate.

A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

A system such as classical mechanics may be 'scientific' to any degree you like; but those who uphold it dogmatically - believing, perhaps, that it is their business to defend such a successful system against criticism as long as it is not conclusively disproved - are adopting the very reverse of that critical attitude which in my view is the proper one for the scientist.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both.

One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

That's how the scientists discover new science. They start out with a hypothesis--an idea--and then others believe enough in the idea that they make it true. You see?

An experiment disproving a prediction is discovery.

But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.

The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong... There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated.