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.
Kip ThorneRead
As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.
Interpretation
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.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific integrity, this quote serves to remind students about the role of errors in scientific advancement.
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.
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.
Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.
'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.
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.
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.
No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine.
If the government regulates against use of drones or stem cells or artificial intelligence, all that means is that the work and the research leave the borders of that country and go someplace else.
We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.
Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.
The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.
After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say "Russia!" to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, "How much?" We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.
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