If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
Interpretation
Science is inherently uncertain and constantly evolving; believing otherwise is a misconception.
Richard P. Feynman's quote highlights the misconception that science provides absolute certainty. Instead, he emphasizes that science is a dynamic process, full of uncertainties and ongoing discoveries. This perspective encourages a humble approach to knowledge, acknowledging that our understanding may change with new evidence and insights.
In practice
Use this quote in a science class to explain the nature of scientific inquiry.
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.
The question of whether or to what extent human activities are causing global warming is not a matter of ideology, let alone of belief. The issue is simply one of risk management.
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
...for a long time I wanted to become a theologian... now, however, behold how through my efforts God is being debated in astronomy.
If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.
The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we donβt truly understand.
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