To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only.
Interpretation
Embracing uncertainty is essential for scientific progress.
Richard P. Feynman emphasizes the importance of maintaining a sense of curiosity and openness to the unknown in the pursuit of knowledge. He suggests that rigidly deciding on answers can stifle discovery, and that allowing for ambiguity can lead to greater understanding and progress in science.
In practice
During a science seminar discussing the nature of inquiry.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text.
In the Radiation Laboratory we count it a privilege to do everything we can to assist our medical colleagues in the application of these new tools to the problems of human suffering.
When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.
Our goal is not to completely eradicate the infection - that would be very difficult - but to produce a vaccine that will prevent not infection but disease. I think this is more possible.
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes-an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
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