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.
In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people who would shut up the human race upon this globe, we shall one day travel to the Moon, the planets, and the stars with the same facility, rapidity and certainty as we now make the ocean voyage from Liverpool to New York.
All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook.
The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.
The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.
We know very little about the universe. I personally don't believe it's uniform and the same everywhere. That's like saying the earth is flat.
You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets.
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