The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters in themselves.
Interpretation
The journey to understanding the universe is as remarkable as the discoveries themselves.
Johannes Kepler emphasizes the significance of the process and effort involved in gaining knowledge about celestial phenomena. He suggests that the methods and roads taken by individuals to achieve insights into the cosmos are just as awe-inspiring as the insights themselves, highlighting the value of intellectual curiosity and discovery.
In practice
In a speech about scientific exploration, one might cite Kepler's quote to emphasize the importance of inquiry.
...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.
A most unfailing experience... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.
We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.
Eyesight should learn from reason.
I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]
We are survival machines β robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Science without conscience is the death of the soul.
The image of the scientist who puts the pursuit of truth before anything else has been shattered and replaced by a man on the make or a quasi-religious enthusiast who wants to prove his case at any cost. Science is becoming the tool of campaigning warfare, in which truth is the first casualty.
If you canβt program it, you havenβt understood it.
In fast moving fields like cancer, where doctors tailor treatments based on evidence that's constantly evolving, two years can be an eternity of waiting to learn about important science. For some patients, that interval can be fatal.
It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.