Logic & Experience

In 1921 Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics. In 1923 he gave a speech in celebration of Poincare at Oxford.

The question he addressed was "How shall we conceive the relation between empirical data and scientific theories?".

He praised Euclid, Kepler and Galileo and then said:

" Pure logical thinking can give us no knowledge whatsoever of the world of experience; all knowledge about reality begins with experience and terminates in it.
Conclusions obtained by purely rational processes are, so far as reality is concerned, entirely empty. It was because he [Galileo] recognised this, and especially because he impressed it upon the scientific world that Galileo became the father of modern physics and in fact of the whole of modern natural science ".