If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Interpretation
Expert opinions can be trusted when they affirm possibilities; however, they may be mistaken when they assert impossibilities.
Arthur C. Clarke’s quote underscores the notion that while seasoned scientists possess invaluable knowledge and experience, their assertions about what is possible—or impossible—should be approached with caution. The quote suggests that the essence of discovery and innovation often defies established boundaries, and that a claim of impossibility may hinder progress and creativity. It encourages a mindset open to exploring new ideas, even if they challenge the status quo.
In practice
In a scientific conference while discussing breakthrough technologies.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by human kind.
Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern.
There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.
It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.
Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.
Every three weeks, we bring online as much solar power as we did in all of 2008...That’s why, over the past six years, we’ve done more than ever before to combat climate change, from the way we produce energy, to the way we use it.
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