Common Sense vs. Evidence

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

response by Neils Bohr.

All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.

Paracelsus.

What is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true.

H.L. Mencken.

Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.

Niels Bohr.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Niels Bohr.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

Niels Bohr.

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

Niels Bohr.

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

Niels Bohr.

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

Albert Einstein.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Albert Einstein.

Never memorize what you can look up in books.

Albert Einstein.

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in the United States is closely connected with this.

Albert Einstein.

the chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direction - a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory - who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unusual point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself. I say sacrificed himself because he most likely will get nothing from it, because the truth may lie in another direction, perhaps even the fashionable one.

Richard Feynman. - Nobel Prize speech

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

Richard Feynman. - Cargo Cult Science

I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Richard Feynman. - Cargo Cult Science

If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

Richard Feynman. - Cargo Cult Science

If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.

Richard Feynman. - Rogers' Commission Report

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman. - Rogers' Commission Report

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman.

Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation ... Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way:

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Richard Feynman.

The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.

Richard Feynman.

Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

Richard Feynman.

I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

Richard Feynman.

So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies . . . publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

Alan Sokal - A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

William Osler.

Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.

William Osler.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

William Osler.

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

William Osler.

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

William Osler.

In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.

Louis Pasteur.

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

Louis Pasteur.

Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.

Thomas Henry Huxley.

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas Henry Huxley.

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.

Thomas Henry Huxley.

My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.

Thomas Henry Huxley.

There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.

Tom Stoppard

All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes, if inspired.

G. K. Chesterton

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

G. K. Chesterton

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

G. K. Chesterton

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

George Santayana

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

Karl Popper

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

Upton Sinclair

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.

Frédéric Bastiat

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

Herbert Spencer

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams

We're not presuming the answers before we ask the questions.

Lawrence Krauss explaining how science works

Malo Periculosam Libertatem Quam Quietum Servitium.

Better freedom with danger than peace with slavery.

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

Wislawa Szymborska

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor.

Well, yes, but they "know." They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all.

They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments' force.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

George Santayana

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

George Santayana

There is a fundamental difference between religion,

which is based on authority,

and science,

which is based on observation and reason.

Science will win because it works.

Stephen Hawking.

The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.

H.L. Mencken.

It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.

H.L. Mencken.