There can sometimes be this fear among laypeople: 'I don't understand everything in science perfectly, so I just can't say anything about it.' I think it's good to know that we scientists are also confused some of the time.
Interpretation
It's okay to be confused about science; even scientists don't have all the answers.
This quote by Lisa Randall emphasizes that many people feel intimidated by science due to their lack of understanding. However, she assures that even scientists have moments of confusion, promoting a more accessible and relatable view of science that encourages discussion and inquiry rather than silence due to fear of inadequacy.
In practice
In a science class, when discussing complex topics, a teacher might say this quote to reassure students.
There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiar with. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny or warped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actually observe in the universe.
We have this very clean picture of science, you know, these well-established rules with which we make predictions. But when you're really doing science, when you're doing research, you're at the edge of what we know.
Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.
People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.
It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.
Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks.
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.
The total quantity of all the forces capable of work in the whole universe remains eternal and unchanged throughout all their changes. All change in nature amounts to this, that force can change its form and locality, without its quantity being changed. The universe possesses, once for all, a store of force which is not altered by any change of phenomena, can neither be increased nor diminished, and which maintains any change which takes place on it.
Q: What were you thinking when your colleagues were out there making cosmic history? A: I just kept reminding myself that every single component in this spacecraft was provided by the guy who submitted the cheapest tender.
There was a magic about pulsars... no other things in the sky had such labels on them. Each one had its own distinct pulsing frequency, so it could be identified by anybody, including other creatures, after a long period of time and far, far away.
The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.