Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
Interpretation
The quote encourages deep exploration and understanding beyond mere facts. It emphasizes the importance of discovering underlying principles and laws.
Ivan Pavlov suggests that simply storing information is insufficient; instead, he advocates for an analytical approach to understand the mechanisms behind the information we encounter. This involves probing deeper into the nature of facts and uncovering the principles and patterns that dictate their behavior, fostering a more profound comprehension of the world.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific methods, this quote can be used to inspire students to think critically.
If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere.
From the described experiment it is clear that the mere act of eating, the food even not reaching the stomach, determines the stimulation of the gastric glands.
When the dog is repeatedly teased with the sight of objects inducing salivary secretion from a distance, the reaction of the salivary glands grows weaker and weaker and finally drops to zero.
It is not accidental that all phenomena of human life are dominated by the search for daily bread - the oldest link connecting all living things, man included, with the surrounding nature.
Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.
Learn the ABC of science before you try to ascend to its summit.
The invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that.
If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity to guinea pigs, it might never have been used by man.
So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.
Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.
Going to Mars would evolve humankind into a two-planet species.
It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.
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