Quotes About Knowledge

Altogether, according to John McPhee, [geological ages] number in the "tens of dozens." Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any of them again.

The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms.

It was all a long time ago and at this stage we just don't know.

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting

like physics before it," Woese wrote, "has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation." In

Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook)

So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete." In

In short, there is just a great deal we don't know.

it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

in the words of Carl Sagan.

The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you where babies came from. And these, you may recall, were men who thought science was nearly at an end. *

In short, the remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know. In

Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution.

We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At

At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand. And

And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me. So

but then Americans appear to know a great deal about drugs. Nearly all the advertisements assume an impressively high level of biochemical familiarity.

The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa.

was not so much how memory works as how difficult it is to understand how it works.

Personally I can think of nothing more exciting—certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee—than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about.

Bacon's dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim 'there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied'.