The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal.
Interpretation
Scientific theories must be verified by facts, as they provide an unbiased evaluation.
This quote emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence in validating scientific theories. Louis Agassiz asserts that while theories may be constructed based on hypotheses and assumptions, it is ultimately the facts that will either support or refute them, highlighting the role of objective truth in scientific inquiry.
In practice
This quote can be used in a scientific presentation to stress the importance of empirical validation.
I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,-this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.
The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world.
Select such subjects that your pupils cannot walk out without seeing them. Train your pupils to be observers, and have them provided with the specimens about which you speak. If you can find nothing better, take a house-fly or a cricket, and let each one hold a specimen and examine it as you talk.
The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive the light, there must have been light to enter it.
The surface of the earth is not simply a stage on which the thousands of present and past inhabitants played their parts in turn. There are much more intimate relations between the earth and the living organisms which populated it, and it may even be demonstrated that the earth was developed because of them.
The study of Nature is intercourse with the highest mind. You should never trifle with Nature. At her lowest her works are the works of the highest powers, the highest something in the universe, in whichever way we look at it... This is the charm of Study from Nature itself; she brings us back to absolute truth wherever we wander.
Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.
All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.
No one trusts a model except the man who wrote it; everyone trusts an observation, except the man who made it.
I've been so lucky to have done two spacewalks. If you looked at your wristwatch, I was outside about 15 hours, which is about 10 times around the world. And, you know, there's a whole time dilation, distortion thing.
The reality is the majority of us will not get off this planet. So the long run is, some kind of space exploration has to benefit us here on Earth.
I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.