A Quote by Ernst Mayr

The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.

Ernst Mayr

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Ask Facts Failed History History Of Science Important Investigator Knows New Possession Questions Right Right Questions Science Scores Simply The History Of Theory

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Ernst Mayr
German - Scientist
July 5, 1904 - February 3, 2005

Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.

John Michael Greer

When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not philosophy, that's one science or another. Anywhere in life where you find that people aren't quite sure what the right questions to ask are, what they're doing, then, is philosophy.

Daniel Dennett

I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

Madeleine L'Engle

Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It's important to be able to simply ask the questions. Every single advance in science comes about because of courage to ask a question, an outrageous question. Like "Can a large heavy metal object fly if it goes fast enough with the right design?" People's worldviews are changed when they see that something unbelievable is possible. Airplane flight is now taken for granted. And so all wonderful advances start with an outrageous question.

Lynne McTaggart

Evolution is one of the most powerful and important ideas ever developed in the history of science. Every question it raises leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself. It is also the most meaningful creation story that humans have ever found.

Bill Nye

Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition.

Ricky Gervais

The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Michael Crichton

It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science ... simply because it deals with quantities... As the complete theory of almost every other science involves the use of calculus, so we cannot have a true theory of Economics without its aid.

William Stanley Jevons

An expert knows all the answers - if you ask the right questions.

Levi Strauss

Religion asks you to believe things without questioning, and technology and science always encourage you to ask hard questions and why it is important in science and technology. So I was always interested in science and technology.

Vinod Khosla

The history of acceptance of new theories frequently shows the following steps: At first the new idea is treated as pure nonsense, not worth looking at. Then comes a time when a multitude of contradictory objections are raised, such as: the new theory is too fancy, or merely a new terminology; it is not fruitful, or simply wrong. Finally a state is reached when everyone seems to claim that he had always followed this theory. This usually marks the last state before general acceptance.

Kurt Lewin

I was the youngest child. I got to be myself and ask stupid questions because I was the youngest. It is so important to listen to the questions children have and reward them for the wondrous questions they ask.

May-Britt Moser

We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime.

Peter Abrahams

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

William Lawrence Bragg

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.

Charles Caleb Colton

A Quote by Ernst Mayr

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