Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
Interpretation
Philosophy of science offers little practical benefit to scientists, similar to how birds do not need ornithology to fly.
In this quote, Richard P. Feynman humorously expresses the idea that the theoretical frameworks or philosophical discussions surrounding scientific practices may not be essential or practically useful for scientists in their day-to-day work. Instead, scientists often focus on empirical data and practical application rather than philosophical debates, just as birds do not rely on the study of their existence to navigate the skies.
In practice
In a lecture on the role of empiricism in science, this quote can emphasize the practical nature of scientific work.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown.
Every cell in our body, whether it's a bacterial cell or a human cell, has a genome. You can extract that genome - it's kind of like a linear tape - and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell.
We should begin at the very root from which we spring, we should effect a radical reform in the character of the food.
The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious.
This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.
Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.
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