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.
For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.
When you're in a spacecraft, you need to know what things you can touch and what things you shouldn't touch!
One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden.
The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.
The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.
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