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"It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong."

— Feynman, Richard event 1964

Context: From the 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, published as The Character of Physical Law (chapter 7, Seeking New Laws). Feynman describes how a new law is found: guess it, compute its consequences, then compare them with experiment. He speaks of controlled experiments in physics; in fields where experiments are hard to isolate, such as economics, the same principle calls for extra care with data, causality and competing explanations.

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