Quotes About Verification

Qualsiasi studente nell'ora di fisica può provare con esperimenti l'esattezza di un'ipotesi scientifica. L'uomo, invece, vivendo una sola vita, non ha alcuna possibilità di verificare un'ipotesi mediante un esperimento, e perciò non saprà mai se avrebbe dovuto o no dare ascolto al proprio sentimento.

The second key to goal setting is that goals must be measurable and objective. They must be capable of being analyzed and evaluated by a third party.

If I remember it, did it happen?

I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available. Skeptical treatments are much harder to find. Skepticism does not sell well.

the credibility is a consequence of the method.

Una señal inequívoca del amor a la verdad —escribía John Locke en 1690—, es no mantener ninguna proposición con mayor seguridad de la que garantizan las pruebas en las que se basa.» En el tema de los ovnis, ¿cuál es la fuerza de las pruebas?

As with all truth, there would be those who refused to believe it and would not even look at the proof.

Science is not about building a body of known 'facts'. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.

In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.

There are far too many journalists who are in a rush to be first, instead of being right.

There's Frog Jump on my GPS, so it's there. It's a real place.

Don't believe anything dead until you've burned it, poked around in its ashes, and then waited a day or two to see if anything rises from them.

A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testabilty: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

Again, we cannot search the whole world in order to make sure that nothing exists which the law forbids. Nevertheless, both kinds of strict statements, strictly existential and strictly universal, are in principle empirically decidable, each, however, in one way only: they are unilaterally decidable. Whenever it is found that something exists here or there, a strictly existential statement may thereby be verified, or a universal one falsified.

A tapasztalatok motiválhatnak egy döntést, és így egy állítás elfogadását vagy elvetését is, de velük épp úgy nem lehet egy alapállítást igazolni, mint azzal, hogy ököllel rácsapunk az asztalra.

Every 'good' scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.

At least some of them, I suspect, have turned to probability theory in the hope that it would give them what they had originally expected from a subjectivist or epistemological theory of the attainment of truth through verification; that is, a theory of rational and justifiable belief, based upon observed instances.

Popper espoused what became known as 'falsificationism', the doctrine that what we are interested in the sciences is the conditions under which we should reject a proposed law or theory; the proposition that 'all swans are white' is decisively refuted by one black swan, no matter how often it has been 'verified' by sightings of white swans.

In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.