All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.
Interpretation
Understanding a theory is not the same as being able to apply it effectively; knowledge often builds on prior discoveries.
This quote by Alfred North Whitehead highlights the distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical application. It emphasizes that, while many scientific ideas may seem new, they are often the culmination of thoughts and discoveries from those who came before. In essence, it suggests that grasping the essence of a theory is separate from the ability to utilize it in a real-world context, illustrating a deeper understanding of knowledge progression in science.
In practice
In a science class discussing the formulation of theories.
All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
In first place we must observe that the universe is spherical. This is either because that figure is the most perfect, as not being articulated, but whole and complete in itself; or because it is the most capacious and therefore best suited for that which is to contain and preserve all things.
Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.
It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.
Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.
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