In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that scientific facts are those that have been extensively confirmed, and that unlikely possibilities should not be given equal weight in scientific education.
Stephen Jay Gould's quote highlights the importance of scientific consensus and the need for evidence-based reasoning in education. He argues that while it is theoretically possible for unlikely events to occur, such as apples rising instead of falling, educators should focus on established facts that have been rigorously tested and confirmed, as presenting improbable possibilities alongside well-established scientific principles can mislead students about the nature of scientific inquiry and understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a science classroom to illustrate the nature of scientific inquiry.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.
A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy not induced by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before and that often turns out to be more subtle and wonderful than anyone had imagined.
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
The recent developments in cosmology strongly suggest that the universe may be the ultimate free lunch.
It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.
For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.
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