Quotes About Evidence

In general, signalling theory says that if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something, and you choose the noisy way, that means chances are it's because you couldn't do the good way in the first place.

In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

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

In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.

In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances.

No matter how beautiful the theory, one irritating fact can dismiss the entire formulism, so it has to be proven.

Don't confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.

Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.

Moreover, in the experimental sciences, the scientific fraternity must test a new theory to destruction, if possible.

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

To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.

What we should be teaching are the problems and holes and I think there are legitimate problems and holes in the theory of evolution. And what we need to do is to present those fairly from a scientific point of view. And we should lay out areas in which the evidence supports evolution and the areas in the evidence that does not.

If you ask most atheists if the theory of evolution has anything to do with a belief, however, they will tell you that it doesn't. It's not something that has to be believed. It is a 'fact.'

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.

Evolution is a theory, and it's a theory that you can test. We've tested evolution in many ways. You can't present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.

Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.

We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention.

All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

I think if somebody is so set in their ways about what they feel about something - and you get this a lot in academia, of course, and also different sorts of journalism too - you're going to sweep under the carpet the facts that don't suit your thesis. And I think that happens quite a lot in the courtroom, for instance.

My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's secret.'

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.