Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of observation and open-mindedness in scientific inquiry.
Douglas Adams highlights the crucial step of observing phenomena before forming expectations or conclusions. He warns that if scientists merely look for what they expect to see, they risk missing important insights, thus encouraging a more exploratory and less biased approach to understanding the world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the scientific method to stress the importance of observation.
Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
Researchers keep identifying new species, but they have no idea about the life cycle of a given species or its other hosts. They cut open an animal and find a new species. Where did it come from? What effect does it have on its host? What is its next host? They don't know and they don't have time to find out, because there are too many other species waiting to be discovered and described.
Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.
We should've asked China to be a portion of the space station. We should've worked out ways that we can... just give away the technology that we have that puts things up into space, with cooperation up above the atmosphere that's needed to help each other.
An idea can be tested, whereas if you have no idea, nothing can be tested and you don't understand anything. The molecule that you make when you are getting sunburned or when you eat a lot of food is part of the same molecule that contains an endorphin or an opiate. No one has ever had a hypothesis about why the two are together.
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it.
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