Francis H C Crick - Collected Quotes

"A theory will always command more attention if it is supported by unexpected evidence, particularly evidence of a different kind." (Francis H C Crick, "What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)

"[…] no good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong. A theory that did fit all the data would have been ‘carpentered’ to do this and would thus be open to suspicion." (Francis H C Crick, "What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)

"Physicists are all too apt to look for the wrong sorts of generalizations, to concoct theoretical models that are too neat, too powerful, and too clean. Not surprisingly, these seldom fit well with data. To produce a really good biological theory, one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could build on what was already there." (Francis H C Crick, "What Mad Pursuit?: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)

"One of the striking characteristics of modern science is that it often moves so fast that a research worker can see rather clearly whether his earlier ideas, or those of his contemporaries, were correct or incorrect." (Francis H C Crick, "What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)

"Scientific thinking, which is analytic and objective, goes against the grain of traditional human thinking, which is associative and subjective." (Francis H C Crick, "Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science", 1993)