A Quote by Albert Einstein
Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot get out of the network of already accepted concepts; instead, comically, they only wriggle about inside.
Related Quotes
Theory is worth but little, unless it can explain its own phenomena, and it must effect this without contradicting itself; therefore, the facts are sometimes assimilated to the theory, rather than the theory to the facts.
Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.
No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempt to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions.
Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance.
If facts conflict with a theory, either the theory must be changed or the facts.
Mainstream economics scholarship produces theory without facts ("pure theory") and facts without theory ("applied economics").
Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory it supported by no facts at all.
Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.
All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observed facts. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise then. If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts; it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them.
[The scientist] believes passionately in facts, in measured facts. He believes there are no bad facts, that all facts are good facts, though they may be facts about bad things, and his intellectual satisfaction can come only from the acquisition of accurately known facts, from their organization into a body of knowledge, in which the inter-relationship of the measured facts is the dominant consideration.
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
If the facts don't fit your theory, just find some new facts.
Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.
Langmuir is a regular thinking machine. Put in facts, and you get out a theory.
If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
It is intellectually dishonest to look backwards with all the facts and judge the decisions that were made with almost none of the facts, or the facts that existed hidden in the normal cloud of endless speculation of what might happen.
Related Authors
Alan Lightman Quotes
American
Physicist
Brian Greene Quotes
American
Physicist
Freeman Dyson Quotes
American
Physicist
Gregory Benford Quotes
American
Physicist
J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
American
Physicist
James Clerk Maxwell Quotes
Scottish
Physicist
Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes
American
Physicist
Leonard Mlodinow Quotes
American
Physicist
Lisa Randall Quotes
American
Physicist
Michio Kaku Quotes
American
Physicist
Murray Gell-Mann Quotes
American
Physicist
Niels Bohr Quotes
Danish
Physicist
Richard P. Feynman Quotes
American
Physicist
Roger Penrose Quotes
English
Physicist
Stephen Hawking Quotes
English
Physicist
Werner Heisenberg Quotes
German
Physicist