The improvement of forest trees is the work of centuries. So much more the reason for beginning now.
George Perkins MarshRead
Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.
Interpretation
Science dispels myths and replaces them with greater truths.
In this quote, George Perkins Marsh emphasizes the transformative power of modern science in confronting and debunking superstitions and outdated beliefs. He suggests that as science reveals the reality of our world, it does not merely eliminate misconceptions; rather, it uncovers more profound and beautiful truths about nature, inviting us to appreciate the complexity and wonder of the universe.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of critical thinking, you might say, 'As George Perkins Marsh noted, wherever modern science has exploded a superstitious fable...'
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is that it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.
To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.