Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.
Peter MedawarRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Believing strongly in a hypothesis does not make it true.
This quote highlights the crucial distinction between belief and reality in the scientific process. It emphasizes that regardless of how passionately a scientist may believe in a particular hypothesis, that belief does not affect the actual truth of the hypothesis; true scientific inquiry relies on evidence and rigor rather than on conviction alone.
Themes
Scientific MethodTruthHypothesisBeliefConviction
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about scientific integrity, one might quote Medawar to illustrate the importance of evidence in research.
More from Peter Medawar
All quotes →Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
Peter MedawarRead
Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.
Peter MedawarRead
A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.
Peter MedawarRead
You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.
Peter MedawarRead
It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences.
Peter MedawarRead
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