Quotes About Knowledge

To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of shit.

the stated authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

If I live a day and I don't know a little more than I did the day before, I think I wasted that day.

You realize when you know how to think, it empowers you far beyond those who only know what to think.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices.

What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees

However, every advance in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that we live on a cosmic speck of dust, orbiting a mediocre star in the far suburbs of a common sort of galaxy, among a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The news of our cosmic unimportance triggers impressive defense mechanisms in the human psyche.

What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair's-width from us yet we can agree that no amount of tutelage will ever leave a chimp fluent in trigonometry. Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out?

Explore the universe for what it is, rather than for what it seems.

I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. (Brewster 1860, p. 331)

The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose.

You can not become a scientist if you require that every question has an answer because its the very questions that have no answer that attract you to a laboratory every single day.

One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about the subject, to know you're wrong.

The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective.

I long for a civilization to develop a level of science literacy, so that we can become better shepherds of our future on this planet.

ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist.

One could make a compelling argument that we know more about the universe than the marine biologist knows about the bottom of the ocean or the geologist knows about the center of Earth. Far from an existence as powerless stargazers, modern astrophysicists are armed to the teeth with the tools and techniques of spectroscopy, enabling us all to stay firmly planted on Earth, yet finally touch the stars (without burning our fingers) and claim to know them as never before.

I claim no special knowledge of when the end of science will come, or where the end might be found, or whether an end exists at all. What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves. This limit of our mental faculties, and not necessarily of science itself, ensures to me that we have only just begun to figure out the universe.

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe. What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning.

I claim no special knowledge of when the end of science will come, or where the end might be found, or whether an end exists at all. What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves.

In short, were it not for our ability to analyze spectra, we would know next to nothing about what goes on in the universe.

The universe is knowable...