Quotes About Uncertainty

By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.

If [quantum theory] is correct, it signifies the end of physics as a science.

Hopes are always accompanied by fears, and, in scientific research, the fears are liable to become dominant.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

So much for modern science and its wonderful discoveries that just about everything can kill you. Life is only a bedtime story before a long, long sleep.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

One thing I learned from meteorology is that being an actual science was no guarantee of exactness.

Science is about predictions based on predictable fact. Life is about surprises based on the unpredictable reality.

I never could make out what those damned dots meant.

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

but, in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.

None of us knows anything, not even whether we know or do not know, nor do we know whether not knowing and knowing exist, nor in general whether there is anything or not.

The discontinuous 'reduction of the wave packets' which cannot be derived from Schroedinger's equation is ... a consequence of the transition from the possible to the actual.

If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find it, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.

While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.

Science is uncertain.

It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing is more miserable or more proud than man.

There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.

It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.

Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'.

They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.