Quotes About Knowledge

Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a radical lack of certainty. Its way is fluid, capable of continuous evolution, has immense strength and a subtle magic. It is able to overthrow the order of things and reconceive the world time and again.

La capacidad de comprender antes de ver constituye el corazón del pensamiento científico.

Se il mondo è un un pullulare di effimeri quanti di spazio e di materia, un immenso gioco a incastri di spazio e particelle elementari, noi cosa siamo? [...] Nel grande quadro della scienza contemporanea ci sono molte cose che non capiamo, e una di quelle che capiamo meno siamo noi stessi

Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains.

It was not the applications that motivated them but the natural desire to know.

I may not know something with certainty, but I can still assign a lesser or greater degree of probability to something.

It is the limit up to which we can determine physical variables.

New knowledge emerges from present-day knowledge because within it there are contradictions, unresolved tensions, details that don't add up, fracture lines.

If the world is a swarm of ephemeral quanta of space and matter, a great jigsaw puzzle of space and elementary particles, then what are we? Do we also consist only of quanta and particles? If so, then from where do we get that sense of individual existence and unique selfhood to which we can all testify? And what then are our values, our dreams, our emotions, our individual knowledge? What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?

Because science shows us how to better understand the world, but it also reveals to us just how vast is the extent of what is still not known. The

Our intuitions have developed on the basis of our limited experience.

information is the measure of the number of possible alternatives for something.

It is not against nature to be curious: it is in our nature to be so.

Without clues, we search in the wrong directions. Without evidence, a theory is not reliable.

This is also true from a methodological point of view: a scientist orients his own research on the basis of epistemological ideas. He might be more or less aware of them. Very often to be aware of your own assumptions is far better than to be guided by methodological prejudices of which you are unaware.

Books contain our history; our brains swarm with memories.

Carlo Rovelli

To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known.

The only truly infinite thing is our ignorance.

In the big picture of contemporary science, there are many things that we do not understand, and one of the things that we understand least about is ourselves.

It is characteristic of genius to be aware of the limitations of its own findings

To the very last, the desire to debate, to understand more. To the very last, doubt. This permanent doubt, the deep source of science.

The central point is rebellion against the renunciation of the desire to know. A declaration of faith in the comprehensibility of the world, a proud retaliation to those who remain satisfied with their own ignorance, who call "infinite" that which we don't understand and delegate knowledge elsewhere.

The Einstein who makes more errors than anyone else is precisely the same Einstein who succeeds in understanding more about nature than anyone else.