All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
Interpretation
The essence of scientific inquiry is to approach truth through approximations rather than claiming absolute certainty.
Bertrand Russell's quote emphasizes that the pursuit of scientific knowledge does not yield absolute truths but rather approximations of reality. This understanding encourages humility and open-mindedness in the scientific community, recognizing that as we refine our theories and models, we draw closer to understanding the complexities of the natural world, even if we never achieve complete certainty.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific methodology, one might reference this quote to illustrate the nature of scientific progress.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.
The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.
The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.
A scientist who is also a human being cannot rest while knowledge which might be used to reduce suffering rests on the shelf.
The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.
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