“The job of theorists, especially in biology, is to suggest new experiments. A good theory makes not only predictions, but surprising predictions that then turn out to be true.”

— Francis Crick

If its predictions appear obvious to experimentalists, why would they need a theory?
What Mad Pursuit (1988)

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Francis Crick 16

British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; … 1916–2004

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“The job of theorists, especially in biology, is to suggest new experiments. A good theory makes not only predictions, but surprising predictions that then turn out to be true. (If its predictions appear obvious to experimentalists, why would they need a theory?) ”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

p, 125
What Mad Pursuit (1988)

“Physicists do not believe quantum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy. Theorists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experiments kept bearing out those predictions.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 70

“It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena.”

William Whewell (1794–1866) English philosopher & historian of science

Aphorism 39.
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840)

“If you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Dangerous Minds: Criminal profiling made easy., Malcolm Gladwell, 2007-11-12, The New Yorker, 2008-01-01 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_gladwell,

“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future”

Yogi Berra (1925–2015) American baseball player, manager, coach

The earliest citations of this proverb, from the mid-twentieth century, refer to it as Danish in origin. See http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/
Disputed, Misattributed

“Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.”

Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 1
Context: Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.