Coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory.

Coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory.

But ... the working scientist ... is not consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels complete freedom to utilize any method or device whatever which in the particular situation before him seems likely to yield the correct answer. ... No one standing on the outside can predict what the individual scientist will do or what method he will follow.

My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the articles in the Encyclopaedia, is that it must be public.

I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy.

It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.