Quotes About Knowledge

Probability does not refer to the system as such (the dice, the newspaper editor, the decaying atom, tomorrow's weather), but to the knowledge that I have about this system.

What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.

In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. The

The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope, we can eat.

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider

Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely its openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.

A határozatlanság és tudásunk bizonytalansága, amint azzal tudatlanságunk végtelen szakadékaiba letekintve szembesülünk, nem teszi értelmetlenné az életet, épp ellenkez?leg: értékessé teszi.

we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions that are imprecise:

Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without

Time is our ignorance.

What Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and many others did was to build upon preexisting theories that synthesized empirical knowledge across vast fields of nature, and to find a way of combining and rethinking them, to improve the general picture.

Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge,1 and the discovery that time is not what we thought it was opens up a thousand questions.

The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty.

That which seems intuitive to us now is the result of scientific and philosophical elaborations in the past.

A science that closes its ears to philosophy fades into superficiality; a philosophy that pays no attention to the scientific knowledge of its time is obtuse and sterile. It betrays its own deepest roots, which are evident in the etymology of philosophy: the love of knowledge.

Nuestro saber es demasiado débil para no aceptar vivir en el misterio. Y precisamente porque el misterio existe, y porque es tan profundo, no podemos confiar en quien declara poseer la llave de este misterio. Aceptar la incertidumbre y la novedad de un pensamiento que busca nuevos caminos conlleva nuevos riesgos.

Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be "natural": they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.

It is thus that serious scientists are made.

What does what we know or don't know have to do with the laws that govern the world?

Everything is still confused, and there is a very great deal that remains to be understood.

Ever since we discovered that the Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

Lo que nos hace avanzar es la duda y no la certeza.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

Infinite', ultimately, is the name that we give to what we do not yet know. Nature appears to be telling us that there is nothing truly infinite.