Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.
Interpretation
Understanding comes from the ability to replicate experiences or phenomena.
This quote emphasizes the importance of reproducibility in the scientific method. When a phenomenon can be reproduced, it signifies that the underlying principles are understood, allowing for deeper exploration and comprehension of that phenomenon. This forms a foundation for scientific inquiry and knowledge-building.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a scientific conference where researchers discuss their findings.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts.
The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.
A zero-gravity flight is a first step toward space travel.
There we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.
From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any 'new force' or what not, directing the behaviour of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.