Hypothesis Quotations

“There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.”

Enrico Fermi

“The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere ‘stick’ in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.”

Nikola Tesla

“Science isn’t about authority or white coats; it’s about following a method. That method is built on core principles: precision and transparency; being clear about your methods; being honest about your results; and drawing a clear line between the results, on the one hand, and your judgment calls about how those results support a hypothesis.”

Ben Goldacre

“A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.”

Edward Teller

“I seriously believed that my last hour was approaching, and yet, so strange is imagination, all I thought of was some childish hypothesis or other. In such circumstances, you do not choose your own thoughts. They overcome you.”

Jules Verne

“One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.”

Jean Rostand

“The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion — these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.”

Jerome Bruner

“Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.”

Max Weber

“When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.”

Alice Dreger

“If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing. It is absolutely essential that one should be neutral and not fall in love with the hypothesis.”

David Douglass

“An idea can be tested, whereas if you have no idea, nothing can be tested and you don’t understand anything. “

James D. Watson

“I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.”

Serge Lang

“Knowledge in the Internet Age — networked knowledge — is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it’s provisional; it’s a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.”

David Weinberger

“In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age.”

Thomas Gold

“I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.”

Unknown