Science proceeds more by what it has learned to ignore than what it takes into account.
Interpretation
Scientific progress often comes from focusing on relevant information while disregarding the irrelevant.
Galileo Galilei's quote highlights the essence of scientific inquiry, suggesting that the advancement of knowledge often relies more on the ability to discard unnecessary information than on accumulating facts. This perspective encourages scientists and thinkers to hone their focus, directing their efforts toward what truly matters in their studies, rather than getting lost in trivial details that do not contribute to understanding.
In practice
In a speech about scientific methods, one might quote Galileo to emphasize the importance of focusing on essential data.
It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.
We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false. ... Rather, how much more admirable the painting must be considered, if having no relief at all, it appears to have as much as sculpture!
To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.
Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
In a small lab, if you make a mistake, you can go in the next day and fix it. But here, when you are committed to spending a hundred thousand or a million dollars, you can't fix it later. You need to have a system of checks and balances internally. In particle physics, that's just part of the structure.
The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.
The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.
Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical.
In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions.
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