A Quote by Carl Sagan

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

Carl Sagan

Quote Topics

Aperture Correcting Finding Hypotheses Many Out Perfectly Process Right Science Self Which Wrong

Quote Author

Carl Sagan
American - Scientist
November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996

The thing I loved, particularly, was the mystery of science and the idea that science doesn't know all the answers, but it is a process of finding out. It's not like science will give you the right answer and science knows everything. I love the mysteries of it.

Dallas Campbell

So many people among non-scientists see science as an unassailable monolith of truth, and it's not. It's an ongoing self-correcting process.

Kitty Ferguson

Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it also is a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong.

Allan Sandage

The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.

Freeman Dyson

The process of science is difficult and challenging. It involves always being aware that your ideas might be right or they might be wrong. I think it's that kind of balance that makes science so interesting.

Lisa Randall

SCIENCE: a way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong.

Terry Pratchett

Many 'hard' scientists regard the term 'social science' as an oxymoron. Science means hypotheses you can test, and prove or disprove. Social science is little more than observation putting on airs.

Michael Kinsley

Scientists are human-they're as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.

Cyril Ponnamperuma

Given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite. For example, there are circumstances when it is advisable to introduce, elaborate and defend ad hoc hypotheses, or hypotheses which contradict well-established and generally accepted experimental results, or hypotheses whose content is smaller than the content of the existing and empirically adequate alternative, or self-inconsistent hypotheses, and so on.

Paul Feyerabend

We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.

Bjorn Lomborg

Are science and Christianity friends? The answer to that is an emphatic yes, for any true science will be perfectly compatible with the truths we know by God's revelation. But this science is not naturalistic, while modern science usually is.

Albert Mohler

" Science is beginning to encroach on every level of our volition". And to me, that is a frightening social concept. It doesn't have anything to do with the right to have an abortion verses the right to life. It has to do with the ability of science to keep things alive and the ability of science to really control our lives.

Stephen King

We call the one side [of humanity] religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. ... Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.

George Bernard Shaw

For this knowledge of right living, we have sought a new name... . As theology is the science of religious life, and biology the science of [physical] life ... so let Oekology be henceforth the science of [our] normal lives ... the worthiest of all the applied sciences which teaches the principles on which to found... healthy... and happy life.

Ellen Swallow Richards

When the wrong question is being asked, it usually turns out to be because the right question is too difficult. Scientists ask questions they can answer. That is, it is often the case that the operations of a science are not a consequence of the problematic of that science, but that the problematic is induced by the available means.