“My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance.”

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm <br class="br">The Politics of Experience (1967) <br class="br">Context: Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing &quot;the facts&quot;. We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the &quot;evidence&quot;.<br>We can see other people&#x27;s behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person&#x27;s experience, but only with his behaviour.<br>The other person&#x27;s behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other&#x27;s behaviour to the other&#x27;s experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience.

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 225-226

The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (2005).
Context: My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.

The Development Hypothesis (1852)
Context: Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 10
Context: The fall of meteoric stones was occasionally reported by good witnesses during many ages. But science did not understand how stones should be formed in or beyond the atmosphere... The accounts of the fall of meteoric stones were held to be incompatible with the laws of nature, and specimens which had been seen to fall by hundreds of people were preserved in cabinets of natural history as ordinary minerals, 'which the credulous and superstitious regarded as having fallen from the clouds.' A committee of the French Academy of Sciences, including the celebrated Lavoisier, unanimously rejected an account of three nearly contemporary descents of meteorites which reached them on the strongest evidence. After two thousand years of incredulity, the truth in this matter was forced upon the scientific world about the beginning of the present century. There would have been at any time, of course, an instant cessation of skepticism if any one could have shewn, a priori, from ascertained principles in connection with the atmosphere, how stones were to be expected to fall from the sky. But what is this but to say that facts by themselves, however well attested, are wholly useless in such circumstances to the cultivators of physical science, while any kind of vague hypothesis can be brought forward in opposition to them? What is it but to put conjecture or prejudice above fact, and indeed utterly to repudiate the Baconian method?

&quot;Einstein and the Search for Unification&quot;, p. 10 https://books.google.com/books?id=rEaUIxukvy4C&amp;pg=PA10, in The legacy of Albert Einstein: a collection of essays in celebration of the year of physics (2007)

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter III, POWER AND LIBERTY A THEORY OF POLITICS, p. 55.

Source: Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016), Ch. 3 Fantasy, p 322