May I not seem to have lived in vain.
Tycho BraheRead
When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
Interpretation
Tycho Brahe expresses the confusion and doubt that can arise in the face of extraordinary discoveries.
In this quote, Tycho Brahe reflects on the moment he realized he had witnessed a celestial event unlike any before. The overwhelming nature of this discovery led him to question the reliability of his observations, highlighting the tension between empirical evidence and belief. This suggests that even the most astute observers can experience doubt when confronted with the unknown or extraordinary phenomena in nature.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of scientific discovery, you might quote Brahe to illustrate how remarkable findings can lead to skepticism.
May I not seem to have lived in vain.
Those who study the stars have God for a teacher.
Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.
I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa.
Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
The most important tool of the theoretical physicist is his wastebasket.
If Providence has created the stars and the planets, man has called the cannonball into existence.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.