The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.
Interpretation
Truth is determined through experimentation rather than personal beliefs or appealing theories.
In this quote, Lawrence M. Krauss emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence in understanding truth. He argues that subjective comfort and aesthetic appeal of beliefs or models should not override the necessity for experimental validation, highlighting the core principle of the scientific method where findings must be backed by observable and repeatable evidence.
In practice
In a scientific presentation when discussing the importance of data over opinion.
The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.
If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything.
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.
The universe is the way it is , whether we like_x000D_ it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent_x000D_ of our desires . A world without God or purpose may seem harsh_x000D_ or pointless, but that alone doesn ' t require God to actually exist.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Science is only βoneβ of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, too pushy and too dangerous to be left on its own.
Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.
It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory-if we look for confirmations. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions... A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.
The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.
One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.
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