It is crucial for scientists to be willing to be wrong; otherwise, you might not do the most important experiments, or you may ignore your most important findings.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
Everybody, as soon as they do a good experiment, their first thought in this lab is, 'That can't be right. I must have screwed it up. What did I do wrong?' And that's the best kind of scientist because they're filled with this self-doubt. And if I'm going to be honest, that's who I am. And it's what drives me.
I think it's important for scientists to be a bit less arrogant, a bit more humble, recognising we are capable of making mistakes and being fallacious - which is increasingly serious in a society where our work may have unpredictable consequences.
Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'
Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.
Scientists are very afraid of being proven wrong.
The scientific method actually correctly uses the most direct evidence as the most reliable, because that's the way you are least likely to get led astray into dead ends and to misunderstand your data.
You don't want to come out with anything that's wrong, of course, in a scientific, you know, a major scientific announcement, and so you're being so careful trying to check, well maybe it's this, maybe it's that, you're looking at every possible thing.