Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
Thorstein VeblenRead
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
Interpretation
Serious research leads to more questions, expanding our understanding rather than providing definitive answers.
Thorstein Veblen's quote emphasizes the nature of serious research as a process that deepens inquiry. Rather than simply answering questions, effective research generates additional questions, highlighting the complexities and layers of knowledge in any field. This reflects the idea that exploration and curiosity are fundamental to intellectual growth and scientific advancement.
In practice
In a lecture on the scientific method, you might reference this quote to illustrate the importance of inquiry.
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.
With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.
The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.
This field is not necessarily glamorous, nor does it often produce immediate results, but it seeks to increase our basic understanding of living processes.
Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.
The goal is to learn more about telomere length and other markers of ageing, how best to measure these markers, how they are related to health and lifestyle, and how people respond to learning their own telomere length results.
Physicists analyse systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.
I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don't know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.
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