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As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.
Kip Thorne
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Being humble is a result of frequently realizing one's errors in the pursuit of truth.

Kip Thorne highlights the importance of humility in the scientific process, emphasizing that true scientists are often faced with the evidence that disproves their previous beliefs. This iterative process of being wrong and learning from those mistakes contributes to a more grounded and open-minded approach to knowledge and discovery.

Themes

HumilityScienceLearningTruthErrorKnowledge

In practice

Example use cases

In a lecture on scientific integrity, this quote serves to remind students about the role of errors in scientific advancement.

More from Kip Thorne

If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.
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I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.
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Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.
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'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.
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If you think that the distance from the Earth to the nearest planet where we could live comfortably... is being, like, from New York to Australia... what we've achieved so far, in going to the moon, that's about two-and-a-half inches. So that's the challenge.
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A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.
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