It's important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don't know.
Martin ReesRead
Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.
Interpretation
Theory provides context to facts, making them meaningful and useful in science.
This quote expresses the importance of theory in the scientific process. It suggests that while facts are critical, without a theoretical framework to interpret and understand them, those facts lack significance and direction, rendering scientific knowledge ineffectual.
In practice
During a lecture on scientific methodology, this quote can emphasize the role of theory.
It's important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don't know.
So how can we test the idea that the transition from nonlife to life is simple enough to happen repeatedly? The most obvious and straightforward way is to search for a second form of life on Earth. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if the path to life is easy, then life should have started up many times over right here.
Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.
Until now the theory of infinite series in general has been very badly grounded. One applies all the operations to infinite series as if they were finite; but is that permissible? I think not. Where is it demonstrated that one obtains the differential of an infinite series by taking the differential of each term? Nothing is easier than to give instances where this is not so.
When I left NASA, I was looking at how you could use space technologies for developing countries' work.
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