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To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only.
Richard P. Feynman
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Interpretation

What this quote means

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.

Themes

ScienceCuriosityProgressUnknownDiscovery

In practice

Example use cases

During a science seminar discussing the nature of inquiry.

More from Richard P. Feynman

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?
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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.
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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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