Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.
Peter MedawarRead
I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.
Interpretation
Believing strongly in a hypothesis does not make it true.
This quote highlights the crucial distinction between belief and reality in the scientific process. It emphasizes that regardless of how passionately a scientist may believe in a particular hypothesis, that belief does not affect the actual truth of the hypothesis; true scientific inquiry relies on evidence and rigor rather than on conviction alone.
In practice
In a lecture about scientific integrity, one might quote Medawar to illustrate the importance of evidence in research.
Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.
Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.
A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.
You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.
It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences.
Every student of science, even if he cannot start his journey where his predecessors left off, can at least travel their beaten track more quickly than they could while they were clearing the way: and so before his race is run, he comes to virgin forest and becomes himself a pioneer.
Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.
Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of invention. ... [Do not] share the opinion of those narrow minds who disdain everything in science which has not an immediate application. ... A theoretical discovery has but the merit of its existence: it awakens hope, and that is all. But let it be cultivated, let it grow, and you will see what it will become.
It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.
All drugs are poisons the benefit depends on the dosage.
If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.
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